Template talk:Predatory

Restructure

This template serves a good purpose. But they way it's set up is problematic. It's apparently meant to be used on talk pages, it accepts a single argument, which it displays followed by a warning that it is not a reliable source:

www.academeresearchjournals.org/download.php?id=438603387359772169.pdf&type=application/pdf&op=1

Intentionally or not, this precludes the link from displaying as a link: of course it's conceivable there might be good reasons to make it more difficult for people to reach these journals, but that's simply not how wikipedia works: even in articles, if there are problems with a given source (and they can be more serious than it being published in a predatory journal), these are normally flagged up without disrupting the link to the source (e.g. {{better source}} or {{not in source}}). Also, because its unnamed argument is a url which often includes an equals sign, the url will not get displayed at all unless the argument is given as |1=. This is a very easy mistake to make.

A further issue is that the warning is displayed as part of the text: this can be confusing and can break the flow of the text, but more importantly it makes it appear as though it was written by the original poster, and this crosses the bounds of acceptable editing of other editor's talk posts.

I think these issues can be resolved if the template is redone as a superscripted warning (like this: ^predatory), to be displayed after the link. -- Uanfala (talk) 11:53, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

Pinging JzG for their thoughts on that. – Uanfala (talk) 13:12, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

I have no strong feelings, I am increasingly wrapping in nowiki tags to prevent excessive linking - predatory sources are less of a plague than they used to be, since I removed several thousand cites to them over the last few months, but still an issue so whatever you think works best and will help others get utility from it. Guy (Help!) 13:38, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

I've just created Template:Pred, which is roughly how I think the present template should behave. It tags the source as predatory, but in a way that doesn't disrupt the text it's part of and without altering the link. Really, is there any reason to unlink the url? From my (admittedly limited) experience with such issues, I've found that it's usually most convenient to click through to the paper, find the claim in question, see what it's sourced to and then get that source instead. So if there are no other consideration, I think the link should be left as is. – Uanfala (talk) 00:17, 20 January 2018 (UTC)