All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXXIII

[Labster]

Some of our work pages (for example, our page for Oliver Twist) have "Infobox book" on them, and some of those infoboxes have entries in the fields "wiki URL" and "wiki name". The new "Work" header has fields for "fanwiki" and "fanwikiname". We should move the data from the infobox to the header template... and I suspect that this is something that a bot could do.

No rush, even though this would show off some of the new header's functionality. We would have to identify which infoboxes have the data present before moving it from template to template, after all.

A bot could do it, but we could also be lazy and have have the Infobox template write the tabs to the Bucket, then at least the subpages would have the tabs.

By the way, Special:WhatLinksHere/The Wiki Rule is a new todo list.

In other news, I did some research on writing an extension to copy short descriptions into category display, and it seems pretty easy.  I have a couple pages of untested code that I think will do most of the work, and I just have to write some boilerplate and test it.  I'm sure I could harass someone to do security review for 70 lines pretty fast.

The main idea on all of that was going back to how TVT did categories in the old days.  (I have no idea how they do it now; I have not been on their site in over a decade, and have thus never agreed to any new ToS there.)  It used PmWiki traces, which is basically a template that added every link therein into a category in order.  I suppose with things like Bucket and a bunch of time, I could reimplement precisely this, but it's not really in the thought model for MediaWiki itself.  It's a little spooky-action-at-a-distance, and a little DB intensive.  But a plain list of links in a category is also not informative.  Say I'm looking for a trope in Category:Heroic Sacrifice Tropes and I'd like to know at a glance what is the difference between Stupid Sacrifice and Senseless Sacrifice?

Does the page popup help?  Well, kinda, but not really. (I may also change the code to the page popups, but that's another thing.)  But having summaries here would be great.  For places where you don't need to explain why it's a member of a category, just what it is at all.  Like, it's not useful to explain why Love Hina is in Category:Shonen Demographic -- the reason for genres is always "this work uses a set of tropes common to the genre, which are listed on its trope page, and the tropes themselves are probably enumerated on the [genre] tropes category". But it would be useful to describe the work itself here a little.

[robkelk]

I just made a small change to List of Works That Need Summary/Film.

Specifically, replacing the hardcoded "present this in three columns" code in the section "Film (Animated)" with the div col template set to present the content in columns that are 400px wide. The change lets the browser determine how many columns to use based on the width of the browser window, thus letting the page show with two columns on my cellphone and five columns on my desktop.

We've had "div col" on ATT for years, so this isn't new.

Should we use the template to present other lists, or is there something even better for browser compatibility that we should be looking at, or should we just continue with the status quo?

If we are going to use it, is the column width the one we should use?

[robkelk]

I just noticed a bug in the new Work header.

At least on the ATT page for Gilligan's Island, the list of subpages has extra text, which means all of the page links are greyed out. Instead of "Gilligan's Island/SUBPAGENAME", it's showing "Gilligan's Island/and/SUBPAGENAME".

[Bob Schroeck]

We've also got a DISPLAYNAME issue on Useful Notes pages -- I've spotted it several times today/this evening:

   

It looks like somehow, somewhere we have a default DISPLAYNAME set up for works that the {{Useful Notes}} template is trying to override?

[Labster]

We've also got a DISPLAYNAME issue on Useful Notes pages -- I've spotted it several times today/this evening:



It looks like somehow, somewhere we have a default DISPLAYNAME set up for works that the {{Useful Notes}} template is trying to override?

That was a problem with Useful Notes being work-like, but not needing italic titles... and me not realizing how to turn it off correctly.  Fixed yesterday.  I may do a less hacky solution later.

I just noticed a bug in the new Work header.

At least on the ATT page for Gilligan's Island, the list of subpages has extra text, which means all of the page links are greyed out. Instead of "Gilligan's Island/SUBPAGENAME", it's showing "Gilligan's Island/and/SUBPAGENAME".

Ah, the apostrophe bug rears its head again.  In this case I looked at the code of Extension:Subpage Fun and realized that all of the escaping gets disabled if I just have it wrap the pages in links instead.  So now we just grab that, split our string by brackets instead of pipes, and away we go.  I think it's a tiny bit faster this way which is funny.

If we are going to use it, is the column width the one we should use?

In general, column-width is better for responsive design than column-count, though you can use both.  column-width is a minimum width, so the each column will never get smaller than that on small screens.  column-count is the number of columns -- or if you're using a width, the maximum number of columns.  Categories pages use both (as they are now, my extension may disable this later...)

[robkelk]

Just found another bug(? feature?) with the new Work header.

The first episode of the original Thunderbirds series is sufficiently notable to have its own Wikipedia page. However, setting the header on "Thunderbirds (TV series)/Recap/S1/E01 Trapped in the Sky" to {{work|wikipedia=Trapped in the Sky}} (or using "wppage=" instead of "wikipedia=") doesn't override the Wikipedia link on the subpage to point at the specific Wikipedia page -- it still links to the more general page set on the parent ATT work page.

[Labster]

That's a feature, yep. Or: it's working as designed.

What would be the expected behavior here? Add a second Wikipedia tab, add a sub-menu, or replace the main wikipedia tab on this page only? Any tracking categories for this (just the ordinary one, or a special one for subpages?)

[robkelk]

What would be the expected behavior here? Add a second Wikipedia tab, add a sub-menu, or replace the main wikipedia tab on this page only?

I would go with "replace the main wikipedia tab on this page only", but I'm willing to be outvoted on this one.

Any tracking categories for this (just the ordinary one, or a special one for subpages?)

Don't know whether there's any "business" value to tracking this sort of thing.