User talk:Trialpears/Section Transclusion

"Section transclusion" is a vague term

Labelled section transclusion has labelled in it because it depends on the labelling done in the source article. It's about transclusion of labelled portions ("labelled sections") of wikitext. So talking about LST while avoiding the word labelled is imprecise. This is exacerbated by there also being excerpts which are more then apt to be described as "section transclusion", in fact section transclusion (by heading) using the excerpt template is more of a "section transclusion" than "section transclusion" as described on this page. We can't get rid of the word "labelled". There's a reason why LST was given such a technical name. —Alalch E. 20:25, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

@Alalch E. Hm, perhaps you're right, but I'm not convinced. The reason I feel like labelled isn't a great term is that you don't necessarily need an explicit label, but can rather just use a header. I didn't consider excerpts but they could definitely be considered section transclusion and is implemented completely differently. Perhaps we could embrace excerpts as section transclusion though and make a section about it. The end result is the same and that is all that matters for the vast majority of editors. My philosophy about technical information pages is that there should exist one that can easily be read and understood by a new editor and using more techincal terms than necessary doesn't help with that goal --Trialpears (talk) 21:49, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Some clarity suggestions.

I came to this page via this discussion in TFD [[1]], which was so great for a low-tech editor to read. I've seen mentions of LST before and as a non-coder, it made my brain hurt just trying to understand what it is. I don't know if anymore traction has been made on "making the tech work for the editors" but you've gone a long way to making it coherent to an editor like myself. Though I did have a few suggestions for the opening section.

This is different from using templates in that it does not require a separate page to be created, and adding a single template to the page you want to include the content in is usually enough.

The two different uses of template in this sentence are confusing. I'm pretty sure that, in the context of Redrose64's excellent example, the second mention of template would be the tag you put on the Bar article, telling it exactly what marked section of the Foo article to grab and where to insert it. But that I'm only pretty sure demonstrates the problem. Is there an alternative way to refer to the insertion code, that would make it read as less contradictory?

The main benefit of using section transclusion rather than templates is that the content that is used on several articles can be modified while editing the article like normal and does not require you to open a different page.

This section is also unclear and seems to contradict Redrose64's example entirely. The block of text in question does not exist on the sibling articles, only on the source article. So, if you are on one of the sibling articles and want to change that block, you do have to open a different page. I get that you don't need to open a superfluous template page, but only because I read the TFD discussion before I read your revision, not from the way this is worded.

Perhaps this benefit/risk should be explained in simpler terms, like, "With section transclusion, the only pages which need to exist are public-facing Wikipedia articles - no back-end pages containing nothing but a single hunk of data. An editor only needs to open whichever article is hosting that section to edit it; though that does mean that any mistakes made on that hosting article, including an editor changing the heading name of the shared section, can break all the other pages displaying that section."

Then you can go into the use of bots to fix and notify, when this happens.

Though, it might also be better to just use the FooBar-type example here, and spell out the benefits and risks using example page names, rather than trying to find a way to clearly describe all the components in terminology.

I hope this is helpful. I'm always trying to expand my understanding of the tech we use, difficult as that is at times. And I spent 4 years in IT enterprise security. :) But it's great to know that more seasoned editors are discussing ways to make it easier for everyone to understand and use these tools efficiently. CleverTitania (talk) 18:48, 10 July 2023 (UTC)