Templationist

University template changes

Please stop making undiscussed style changes to university navigational templates. There is a style frequently used for large navigational templates on universities (including university articles which have achieved WP:FA status) which involves the school's colors, a subdued gray background, and darker-gray borders. It is implemented in Template:Cornell, Template:Duke_University, Template:New_York_University, and Template:Rutgers, and it was implemented by University of Chicago, which had a maroon background (Maroon is one of Chicago's school colors) before you made it a salmon color.

I don't have a problem if you want to add features to these templates, such as the "edit" link, or the "hide" feature, but please don't make such substantial changes to the look and feel of the templates. I don't believe that there is much value in making all templates less attractive by "standardizing" them, and I believe that it is good for Wikipedia to have attractive, appropriately-themed, and topical navigational templates. Thank you.--TexasDex 06:51, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Apologies for causing irritation, however there were issues I had with the templates I edited:

• The comment on colour at Template:Navbox generic suggests that "multiple navigational templates on one page with different titlebar colors will probably look unpleasant". This is particularly true of Rutgers and Duke, but not so much of Drexel and New York (due to fortunate university colours). By making the titlebars a little less pronounced I was hoping to make them look better on the page. I'm not willing to pursue this, however.
• Two of the templates (Drexel and Duke) use images for the titlebar. This is inappropriate for two reasons: firstly, the images link to the image page, whereas other titlebars for other navigation templates link to the main topic. This might confuse some users. Secondly, it prevents the addition of v.d.e and edit links. It is probably possible to replace the images with regular titlebars that still maintain the colour scheme. I'll probably try working on that another time. Templationist 13:28, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

new Moon footer

I'm pretty much done with the new Moon footer and would appreciate any comments you might have. After looking through all the science navigational templates, I decided to base this on the Physcology footer, which is non-standard, but looks, better, IMO. Here it is User:Lunokhod/test. Its not collapsible, but I don't think it needs to be. Lunokhod 21:58, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Jupiters

In addition to your nomination to delete Template: Moon groups of Jupiter, there are also the redundant templates Template: Jupiter and Template: Jupiter Full Footer that may also deserve nomination. RandomCritic 04:29, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Navigation templates

Please don't put navigation templates at the top of articles. There have been many discussions about this in the past. Navigation templates should go at the bottom or articles, leaving the top of the article for content. -- Solipsist 21:47, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Verified new parser allows 112x more template code

11-Feb-2008: Hello, User:Wikid77 here. A WP admin informed me days ago that a new MediaWiki parser was installed in January 2008, which will skip noinclude-sections formerly restricting the template-processing limits. I have tested the parser now, using some complex mapper templates with "Template:Location map CanadaTerrain" for skewing latitude/longitude markers on conic projection maps of Canada.

In January 2008, the MediaWiki software was quietly revolutionized to use a new recursive-descent parser that bypassed unused template coding (such as in conditional false branches) and skipped template-expansion in the bypassed sections. The new parser now can process nested templates over 112 times larger than in November 2007.

For conditional branches, such as a 100-way switch branch invoking 100 sub-templates to handle details, the template processing might be 100 (or even 1,000) times faster than in November, due to skipping the false branches and skipping expansion of the other 99 unused sub-templates.

If Wikipedia were only a software product, now it should be called "Wikipedia 2" or "Wikipedia NT 2008" because the processing capacity is well over 100 times greater than in 2007. Details of testing the new parser are below (copied from the map-spec talk page).

Yesterday (Feb.10, 2008), I ran temporary tests with "Template:Location map CanadaTerrain" by repeating the Examples section (of the doc subpage) 14 times as 42 example maps using "Location_map_polarx" (28 times) and "Location_map_many_polarx" (14 times). Those 42 examples, combined, contained 10,108 uses of "Location_map_CanadaTerrain" as 10,108= 14 * (206+206+310) calls/transclusions. Meanwhile the map-spec template Location_map_CanadaTerrain was stuffed as 4620 bytes with block-text (beyond the former limit of 1.5kb) to verify that noinclude-sections are skipped by the new parser. The gargantuan total result was over 51 MEGABYTES of nested templates, and all 42 examples displayed their Canada maps with no problems: all 51MB+ of template code was processed with no messages reported. Formerly, only 2 mappings of Location_map_polarx were allowed per article; the combined processing of 42 complex mappings with block-text in map-specs was over 112 times more capacity. The calculation yielding "112" uses the ratio of the block-text size (4620), to the original size (860) of map-spec CanadaTerrain, in processing 42 map templates rather than the prior limit of 2 maps: 42/2 * (4620/860) = 112.81. The test of 42 maps was run twice, several hours apart, to double check the 42 generated maps were all correct. -Wikid77 (talk) 09:51, 11 February 2008 (UTC)