Talk:Glypican 2

Article formatting

Hi Gene,

Concerning your comment:

Will somebody who writes all these articles, or otherwise cares about them, please go through and fix the big, ugly, long, narrow columns of boilerplate garbage.

We must be using a different browser, different page width, or have a different set of aesthetics. In this view, what I see using Safari or Firefox is a compact and efficient view of the article contents with very little wasted screen real estate. In this view what I see is a very inefficient use of the screen with a huge white space in the middle of the page which forces the viewer to scroll down the to the end of the page to see the "Further reading" section of the article. The only way that I can generate "long, narrow columns" with Safari if I use a very narrow browser window width. Granted, it would be much better if this article had more content such that the references and further reading section were displayed after the Protein Box. The idea behind the Gene Wiki pages is to provide "seed" articles with bot generated content which would later be expanded by human edits. Unfortunately this article has yet to be expanded. When you refer to "boilerplate garbage", I assume that you are referring to the "further reading" section. This section contains reliable sources in the scientific peer reviewed literature that demonstrates that the article is notable and will hopefully provide human editors relevant background material with which to expand the article. Cheers. Boghog2 (talk) 02:05, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

And, even with that big chunk of whitespace there, it still ends up with fewer screenfuls on my browser.

In my browser, Mozilla Firefox, with the standard Wikipedia "skin" I have almost 1/4 of my screen taken up by the Wikipedia navigation stuff on the left--and I use several those things, am satisfied with the way it works for the typical articles.

Then the larger-than-it-needs-to-be infobox takes up about 55% of the rest of the screen.

So each of the two columns squeezed in alongside it is only allowed 10% of my screen. And when it extends below the infobox, the right 60% of my screen, and 75% of the article's space on that screen, is white. But then, when you add to it the fact that you are using bulleted lists, those bullets and the resulting indentation cut off about 1/3 of each column. In the first old version you link to, I need to go down seven screens to get to the bottom of the page, in an article with about twenty words and a couple of numbers unique to the subject of the article. And that's counting all the words in any sentence unique to the article, even though 75% of those words are boilerplate too.

The columns are so narrow that I end up with URLs from the left column overwriting text in the right column. Leaving space between columns, the left one can hold the name Wellenreuther on one line, and that is pushing it to its limits. Gene Nygaard (talk) 15:05, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

In contrast, in the version after my edit, it only took me three screens to get all of the article, not seven. Gene Nygaard (talk) 15:11, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

And, if I use a different font size, it is usually the next one larger, not the next one smaller. If I use in this article, the boilerplate pushes below the infobox; in an article where it didn't, "Wellenreuther" will not fit on one line. I don't know if it would go into the next column or be broken somewhere in the middle Gene Nygaard (talk) 15:15, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Some possible solutions

Other than clearing it so that the columns end up below the infobox, there are several other things which could help.

1. The most obvious one, of course, is not to have the boilerplate on each page. Create an article Further reading about human genes or whatever, and link to it from each article. Don't pretend you have a whole bunch of unique information in each article, when clearly you do not.
2. Simply abandon the two-column approach. You will have one column twice as wide (well, actually about three or more times as wide in terms of how much information it can hold on each line, considering space between columns and indentation) until it gets below the infobox, and then below the infobox it will take up the whole part of the screen allocated to the article.
3. That's enough for starters, but there are other possibilities too. Gene Nygaard (talk) 15:21, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Browser window width

OK, now I think understand why our views of the same page are so different. The key was your statement:

1/4 of my screen taken up by the Wikipedia navigation stuff on the left

On my screen ~1/10 is taken up by the navigation stuff on the left. When I decrease my browser window width or increase the font size such that the navigation panel takes up ~1/4 of the window, I also see the behavior that you describe. Using a wide browser window and/or small font, I still believe that the original format is preferable. (Just to make sure that this wasn't a Safari vs. Firefox rendering difference, I looked at the article page with Firefox and the behavior was very similar to Safari: original format looks great with a wide window, terrible with a small window).

I am not sure what the best solution is. One elegant possibility would be dynamic adjustment of the number of columns used to display references: two columns would be the default but would automatically switch to one column if the number of horizontal window pixels fell below a set limit. This is what {{Gallery}} does already. I have no idea if this is possible with the {{Reflist}} template. One possibility is disabiling multiple columns More later. Boghog2 (talk)

Another possible solution

On the {{Reflist}} page:

Using {{'''reflist'''|colwidth=30em}} will allow the browser to automatically choose the number of columns based on the width of the web browser.

I have set up a test using this feature here. I would appreciate if you would take a look at this page (trying both smaller and larger fonts) and let me know what you think. Boghog2 (talk) 21:07, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

That is better. Actually, I have to go down about three steps before it goes to two columns. At one step between, the references are a fairly long column starting to the left of the infobox, but the further reading is a full-width column. I don't know if it is the best solution, but it gives us something most everyone could put up with, I'd think. Gene Nygaard (talk) 22:39, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Great! Thanks for your feed back. I hope this is a solution is acceptable to most people. I have added this request here. Thanks for alerting us to this issue. Cheers. Boghog2 (talk) 19:32, 7 January 2009 (UTC)