All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXXIII

[robkelk]

Hi folks, I have a new page of stuff to work on.  Pages with the wrong template.  I could almost run a bot on this, but first, I'd have to write it, and I already see some false positives like Babylon 5/Recap/Film, which definitely should have the work template after all.  And the other subpages might need helped.  Anyway, there's only 748 of them.  (In exchange my new template fixes thousands of Lint errors, right?)

Yay - more clusters of subpages to fix manually. At least some of these clusters only have one page each.

And as long as we're in the pages, we may as well fix other minor issues such as missing DEFAULTSORT tags, pages that don't use the {{worksubpagefooter}} or {{tropesubpagefooter}} templates, and pages that don't have at least one sentence before the bullet list (and thus show as blank boxes in the Related Pages tool).

There are a couple reasons that the new template hasn't been deployed.  First of all, I found a long-running bug where certain media subpages of works aren't showing up at the top of the page... Lampshade Hanging/Film, for instance, doesn't appear in the menu on its own page, which is wrong.  That needs fixed, so I'm taking the time to rethink about how mediums are listed.

The next one involves Laconics... or really, short descriptions.  Every page should have one, so they show up in the search bar on Vector 2022 and other skins.  We should be able to autogenerate some of them!  Mainly the subpages, which should have standard formats.  "Memes about $WORK" for Memes subpages, "Fan theories about $WORK" for WMG, and so on.  Since there's no other obvious place to autogenerate, that should take place inside the work template, where we already know what kind of subpage we're on.  And of course, you can override that lower down the page if necessary.

The other thing is that some Laconic tabs have links, but Short Descriptions are plain text.  The brackets just come on through to the page.  Sometimes, it is because the description is bad, but you know.  Now, obviously, embedding links to different pages in a search box is just a recipe for tears, so we want it plain text in there.  But I think that maybe I can save the links on the pages themselves.  There's a couple ways to approach it.  The first is to shove the display of the shortdesc into the {{trope}} template, but really, one more thing?  The second is to display it elsewhere on the page, like an infobox... but we don't have those.  I think what it will be its own template, a {{short description}}, which will embed it in a hidden div, and use JS to swap it to the top on page load.  (no JS => you get the plaintext version with links stripped, same as search).

Or instead of a {{short description}} template, just a description= parameter on {{trope}} and {{work}}?  Any opinions on this either way?

Do we really need links on the "laconics"? As I mentioned to Asch... last month, the more that's in a laconic, the less laconic it is.

(And, having just cleaned up the Cloudcookoolander subpages, I have to wonder just how laconic Laocoön was.)