Medicine Template‑class | |||||||
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The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
This was moved here from WT:MED. Please continue the discussion here. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 01:43, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
Some time ago, I came upon Nervous system, which at the time had an insane collection of navboxes - three containers with a total of 10 navboxes, each of which had a complex structure. With the help of Tryptofish, I narrowed the list down to two. But each of these templates, in addition to a large number of its own links, transcludes two "Indexes" to more templates. This was my first hint of a broader problem.
The articles in this WikiProject are in an advanced state of template creep and need surgery. I have never seen such a maze of templates before. Indeed, medical articles have a monopoly of the so-called index templates, also called subnavs, which are footer templates that provide links between templates instead of articles (see Category:Medicine navigational box footer templates).
I would like to explore a recent example of the supposed usefulness of these subnavs provided by at a recent TfD:
But is that how someone is likely to look for this information? The first thing I would try is searching Cardiovascular disease for "anatomy" and "treatment". If I search "anatomy" and the navboxes are in their normal, hidden state (because there are four of them), I get no hits. So how about "treatment"? Now here is something really strange. The word appears nine times in the article - and none of them are linked to anything, despite the existence of Management of heart failure. There is a section, Cardiovascular disease#Management, with a single sentence in it: "Cardiovascular disease is treatable with initial treatment primarily focused on diet and lifestyle interventions."
Anyone who really wants to help that person diagnosed with heart disease would do something like this: Expand Cardiovascular disease#Management into a decent summary of Management of heart failure and link to it with a {{ main}} template. Or, if that is not general enough, create Management of cardiovascular disease and summarize it.
So much for "easy links". But it goes much further than that. Say we click on one of the less general links in {{ Heart diseases}}, like Mitral valve. This is an anatomy article, and does not itself transclude {{ Heart diseases}}. But it does transclude {{ Heart anatomy}}, which transcludes {{ Heart navs}}. So this anatomy article has access to several templates for drugs. How likely is it that a user will find this useful?
Wikipedia provides guidelines that are intended to make navboxes useful. It states,
Navigation templates are particularly useful for a small, well-defined group of articles; templates with a large numbers of links are not forbidden, but can appear overly busy and be hard to read and use. Good templates generally follow some of these guidelines:
- All articles within a template relate to a single, coherent subject.
- The subject of the template should be mentioned in every article.
- The articles should refer to each other, to a reasonable extent.
- There should be a Wikipedia article on the subject of the template.
- If not for the navigation template, an editor would be inclined to link many of these articles in the See also sections of the articles.
But what is the subject of {{ Heart navs}} - Heart or Heart navboxes? As for the other guidelines, how would you even check them? Over 750 articles transclude {{ Heart navs}}, but it wasn't placed directly on any of them. However, it is pretty obvious that any given article will refer only to a very small fraction of the others. When you add a subnav to a template, you are, in effect, giving up on the guidelines.
The guidelines also suggest, "If the collection of articles does not meet these tests, that indicates that the articles are loosely related, and a list or category may be more appropriate." I am going to make a proposal here rather than at a TfD, because I would like to give editors the chance to cooperatively brainstorm a solution.
Proposal: Delete all of the templates in Category:Medicine navigational box footer templates, or replace them by lists or categories. RockMagnetist( talk) 21:27, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
Clarification: Replace some of the templates in Category:Medicine navigational box footer templates by lists or categories, delete the rest. RockMagnetist( talk) 22:46, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
Ping LT910001 who I think is/ has worked on these. Matthew Ferguson ( talk) 02:28, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
RockMagnetist might help if you did a mock up by way of demonstration of what you are proposing. Matthew Ferguson ( talk) 02:30, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for your gentle introduction to this topic, RockMagnetist. Links between medical templates have existed since at least 2008, and recently with some other users I attempted to make these templates somewhat more useable, with a goal to reduce the (huge) amount of navboxes plastered on our many articles by linking them .
Part of your frustration with this template series seems to relate to the incomprehensible jargon we use to describe medical articles and medical diagnosis. This is a frustrating fact of life and with any luck will improve within the next 200-300 years as we move away from Latin and Greek-based names.
For these "indexes", I use these links occasionally myself but having been editing them I am not too impartial about their use. I would love to hear from any editors who have used these to good end. A question that hasn't been asked at any point in the last 6+ years is are these templates actually useful. A few long-term editors agreed last TFD but I am really unsure what other users think and if actual readers use them.
If we get rid of them we should consider removing them completely, as in my experience in the dusty corners of Wikipedia outlines are either forgotten for many years and unusable for that reason, or excessively edited with links from all and sundry that they are also unusable. On the other hand I fear if we remove these links we may end up with users adding more and more navboxes again. Hoping to hear from other users, -- Tom (LT) ( talk) 09:06, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
I think that considering specific examples will make it easier to think about these templates. So I will do two more case studies from the TfD. I will describe my experience as I try the exercises:
@ RockMagnetist I think you are conflating three issues, all quite relevant:
Issues (1) and (2) won't be solved in this discussion but will be by editing away -- and I've opened a thread at the talk page of Wikiproject Anatomy to see what we can do there, also. With regard to these internal navboxes, what would you think about moving them to template space or template documentation? You may a good point as to why they may not be used by readers, but they are supremely useful in part because they help keep track of our project's numerous templates, ensuring that we don't start to have duplicate ones. So one option would be to move them all so they only display in template namespace. This will mean readers are no longer confused. An alternate option would be to include all of the 'index' templates as collapsed, so that only a line "Index of..." is displayed and users can open it at will. -- Tom (LT) ( talk) 22:59, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
Reading through the above, I'm not convinced you've really shown a convincing reason or consensus for a change. I've minimised the extraneous comments in your case studies to illustrate this. I think unfortunately most of your frustration emerges from the way we've structured our articles. I just don't see a way to solve the problem you pose (how to keep navboxes small and compact in an up-to-date way) without using a system like this to ensure that the templates are compartmentalised. Perhaps "Index of..." could be renamed to be even more clear, or a small (?) question mark could be provided with an explanation for lay users to explain what these subnavs do.-- Tom (LT) ( talk) 10:21, 23 September 2015 (UTC)
Here is another statistic that might be easier to understand: {{ Vascular navs}} links to 32 navboxes. Collectively, in the past 30 days, they were visited 13,856 times. [1] The index box appears in about 1600 articles. Thus, it was used an average of 9 times per article over 30 days. [2] At the other end, I would estimate the navboxes have a total of about 1000 links, so on average each target article was accessed about 13 times. Is it really necessary to gather more information? RockMagnetist( talk) 02:12, 27 September 2015 (UTC)
References
Note that the above only provides information on access to the navboxes through the index template. The navboxes themselves might be useful because they are transcluded in each of the articles that they are linked to. That is the kind of thing that could be studied by the method described below. RockMagnetist( talk) 07:09, 27 September 2015 (UTC)
Okay, guys: How serious about this are we? I see some comments here that may degenerate into my-link-is-better-than-your-link, but the fact is that nobody has the overall data.
There is a kludge that will let us see how often links in navboxes get clicked on, if we really want the information. It won't let us separate search engine spiders from real humans, but it will let us get page view counts for clicking a link in a navbox vs other ways of reaching the page. It's not elegant, and it's got some small WP:PERF costs, so we shouldn't do this on a grand scale, but we could certainly try it out for a small number of links in one or two navboxes.
Is that interesting to you? More to the point, is it interesting enough to two or three editors to do the work involved? It'll take an hour to pick templates and links, an hour to set it up, a few minutes each day to check the links for problems/potential corruption, and (after a few weeks or so) an hour to revert the whole setup, and an hour or two to collect the data and write it up. Whether anybody uses these navboxes would actually be a useful thing for WPMED to know, and the results would probably be more or less applicable to all subject areas at the English Wikipedia. But it takes sustained work over the course of a month, and there's no point in starting if the project won't be finished. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 19:10, 24 September 2015 (UTC)
Here are my suggestions for how to fix the template creep in the articles covered by this project. They go beyond my initial point about index templates, but that is necessary because the index templates themselves were designed to fix template creep. I think the suggestions below are consistent with the principles behind good navbox design.
I would also recommend removing those templates that duplicate lists of ICD-9 codes and ICD-10 codes and replace them by links to those lists in See also. In general, these templates are long and intricate, and the information is better presented as a list. RockMagnetist( talk) 16:09, 27 September 2015 (UTC)
My approach. Without fully having read the analysis TL;DR, I just drop a suggestion.
@ DePiep, RockMagnetist while we are experimenting with what to do in terms of drafts, I propose concurrently that we move all these index boxes into template space by moving them into the "noinclude" second of each template.
This can be done at the same time as other editing, and means they won't be displayed to end users. They will however retain their useful purpose for template editing as I have previously explained. -- Tom (LT) ( talk) 20:22, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
I am creating this so we can at least centralise discussion. This option proposes that we simply delete all the navboxes. -- Tom (LT) ( talk) 20:22, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
On day one of removed templates, one has already been replaced with another series of links [5]. Would it be worth emulating this on all the navboxes, or providing a series of links (as you two mention above) in navboxes? I am personally not in favour of this in view of the discussions we've had above, but if other editors are going to do this piecemeal we should discuss it. Thoughts? -- Tom (LT) ( talk) 23:36, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
P i n g s so that you'll all know that this discussion has moved here. Please be liberal in pinging me (and other editors) for this discussion, since it's not the first page I visit every day (unlike WT:MED).
The description at User:Sebwite/navbox study is interesting, but old (pre-mobile), and User:Sebwite doesn't edit often any more, so we might not be able to get much information about it. Any other ideas? WhatamIdoing ( talk) 01:43, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
Before doing this kind of study, we should clarify what we are trying to find out. I am going to repeat the essence of an earlier post because I think it may have been overlooked:
This is hard data because any time someone clicks on a link in {{ Vascular navs}}, they visit a navbox. And it is an upper limit on their use because some people may have visited the navboxes by other routes, and they didn't necessarily use the links once they got there. This analysis is easy to repeat for any of the other index boxes. Even as an upper limit this is really low usage, so I don't see what more we need to know about index boxes; maybe we should refocus our investigations on the regular navboxes. RockMagnetist( talk) 17:31, 8 October 2015 (UTC)
A few years ago i did a major update of the medicine navs with a.o @DePiep and @Tom (LT). I see there's been a nice cleanup since then. What's the current status? Anything an editor with a humble academic medical background can contribute for the navboxes at the moment? PizzaMan ( ♨♨) 20:36, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
Nearly all of the pages that link to
Template:Bone and cartilage navs are themselves templates. And they seem to link to it without any problems. One non-Template page that links to it is
Draft:Bone Malrotation, where the Wikitext {{Template:Bone and cartilage navs}}
generates two link errors, a Stripped tags for </div>
and a missing end tag for <div>
. The problem doesn't go away by removing "Template:".
Template:Bone_and_cartilage_navs/doc says, "This is an embedded medical navbox." If that means that it should not be used anywhere except in another navbox, will someone please edit the doc file and say this, so users and editors will be less likely to use it outside navboxes and more easily diagnose misuse. If it is permitted to use this template outside of navboxes, then why is it causing lint errors at
Draft:Bone Malrotation? —
Anomalocaris (
talk) 05:28, 6 June 2019 (UTC)
Update: I edited Draft:Bone Malrotation, changing
{{Bone and cartilage navs}}
to
<div>{{Bone and cartilage navs}}</div>
and this fixed the lint errors, but my main request remains. — Anomalocaris ( talk) 21:54, 7 July 2019 (UTC)
Medicine Template‑class | |||||||
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This page has archives. Sections older than 31 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 3 sections are present. |
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
This was moved here from WT:MED. Please continue the discussion here. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 01:43, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
Some time ago, I came upon Nervous system, which at the time had an insane collection of navboxes - three containers with a total of 10 navboxes, each of which had a complex structure. With the help of Tryptofish, I narrowed the list down to two. But each of these templates, in addition to a large number of its own links, transcludes two "Indexes" to more templates. This was my first hint of a broader problem.
The articles in this WikiProject are in an advanced state of template creep and need surgery. I have never seen such a maze of templates before. Indeed, medical articles have a monopoly of the so-called index templates, also called subnavs, which are footer templates that provide links between templates instead of articles (see Category:Medicine navigational box footer templates).
I would like to explore a recent example of the supposed usefulness of these subnavs provided by at a recent TfD:
But is that how someone is likely to look for this information? The first thing I would try is searching Cardiovascular disease for "anatomy" and "treatment". If I search "anatomy" and the navboxes are in their normal, hidden state (because there are four of them), I get no hits. So how about "treatment"? Now here is something really strange. The word appears nine times in the article - and none of them are linked to anything, despite the existence of Management of heart failure. There is a section, Cardiovascular disease#Management, with a single sentence in it: "Cardiovascular disease is treatable with initial treatment primarily focused on diet and lifestyle interventions."
Anyone who really wants to help that person diagnosed with heart disease would do something like this: Expand Cardiovascular disease#Management into a decent summary of Management of heart failure and link to it with a {{ main}} template. Or, if that is not general enough, create Management of cardiovascular disease and summarize it.
So much for "easy links". But it goes much further than that. Say we click on one of the less general links in {{ Heart diseases}}, like Mitral valve. This is an anatomy article, and does not itself transclude {{ Heart diseases}}. But it does transclude {{ Heart anatomy}}, which transcludes {{ Heart navs}}. So this anatomy article has access to several templates for drugs. How likely is it that a user will find this useful?
Wikipedia provides guidelines that are intended to make navboxes useful. It states,
Navigation templates are particularly useful for a small, well-defined group of articles; templates with a large numbers of links are not forbidden, but can appear overly busy and be hard to read and use. Good templates generally follow some of these guidelines:
- All articles within a template relate to a single, coherent subject.
- The subject of the template should be mentioned in every article.
- The articles should refer to each other, to a reasonable extent.
- There should be a Wikipedia article on the subject of the template.
- If not for the navigation template, an editor would be inclined to link many of these articles in the See also sections of the articles.
But what is the subject of {{ Heart navs}} - Heart or Heart navboxes? As for the other guidelines, how would you even check them? Over 750 articles transclude {{ Heart navs}}, but it wasn't placed directly on any of them. However, it is pretty obvious that any given article will refer only to a very small fraction of the others. When you add a subnav to a template, you are, in effect, giving up on the guidelines.
The guidelines also suggest, "If the collection of articles does not meet these tests, that indicates that the articles are loosely related, and a list or category may be more appropriate." I am going to make a proposal here rather than at a TfD, because I would like to give editors the chance to cooperatively brainstorm a solution.
Proposal: Delete all of the templates in Category:Medicine navigational box footer templates, or replace them by lists or categories. RockMagnetist( talk) 21:27, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
Clarification: Replace some of the templates in Category:Medicine navigational box footer templates by lists or categories, delete the rest. RockMagnetist( talk) 22:46, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
Ping LT910001 who I think is/ has worked on these. Matthew Ferguson ( talk) 02:28, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
RockMagnetist might help if you did a mock up by way of demonstration of what you are proposing. Matthew Ferguson ( talk) 02:30, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for your gentle introduction to this topic, RockMagnetist. Links between medical templates have existed since at least 2008, and recently with some other users I attempted to make these templates somewhat more useable, with a goal to reduce the (huge) amount of navboxes plastered on our many articles by linking them .
Part of your frustration with this template series seems to relate to the incomprehensible jargon we use to describe medical articles and medical diagnosis. This is a frustrating fact of life and with any luck will improve within the next 200-300 years as we move away from Latin and Greek-based names.
For these "indexes", I use these links occasionally myself but having been editing them I am not too impartial about their use. I would love to hear from any editors who have used these to good end. A question that hasn't been asked at any point in the last 6+ years is are these templates actually useful. A few long-term editors agreed last TFD but I am really unsure what other users think and if actual readers use them.
If we get rid of them we should consider removing them completely, as in my experience in the dusty corners of Wikipedia outlines are either forgotten for many years and unusable for that reason, or excessively edited with links from all and sundry that they are also unusable. On the other hand I fear if we remove these links we may end up with users adding more and more navboxes again. Hoping to hear from other users, -- Tom (LT) ( talk) 09:06, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
I think that considering specific examples will make it easier to think about these templates. So I will do two more case studies from the TfD. I will describe my experience as I try the exercises:
@ RockMagnetist I think you are conflating three issues, all quite relevant:
Issues (1) and (2) won't be solved in this discussion but will be by editing away -- and I've opened a thread at the talk page of Wikiproject Anatomy to see what we can do there, also. With regard to these internal navboxes, what would you think about moving them to template space or template documentation? You may a good point as to why they may not be used by readers, but they are supremely useful in part because they help keep track of our project's numerous templates, ensuring that we don't start to have duplicate ones. So one option would be to move them all so they only display in template namespace. This will mean readers are no longer confused. An alternate option would be to include all of the 'index' templates as collapsed, so that only a line "Index of..." is displayed and users can open it at will. -- Tom (LT) ( talk) 22:59, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
Reading through the above, I'm not convinced you've really shown a convincing reason or consensus for a change. I've minimised the extraneous comments in your case studies to illustrate this. I think unfortunately most of your frustration emerges from the way we've structured our articles. I just don't see a way to solve the problem you pose (how to keep navboxes small and compact in an up-to-date way) without using a system like this to ensure that the templates are compartmentalised. Perhaps "Index of..." could be renamed to be even more clear, or a small (?) question mark could be provided with an explanation for lay users to explain what these subnavs do.-- Tom (LT) ( talk) 10:21, 23 September 2015 (UTC)
Here is another statistic that might be easier to understand: {{ Vascular navs}} links to 32 navboxes. Collectively, in the past 30 days, they were visited 13,856 times. [1] The index box appears in about 1600 articles. Thus, it was used an average of 9 times per article over 30 days. [2] At the other end, I would estimate the navboxes have a total of about 1000 links, so on average each target article was accessed about 13 times. Is it really necessary to gather more information? RockMagnetist( talk) 02:12, 27 September 2015 (UTC)
References
Note that the above only provides information on access to the navboxes through the index template. The navboxes themselves might be useful because they are transcluded in each of the articles that they are linked to. That is the kind of thing that could be studied by the method described below. RockMagnetist( talk) 07:09, 27 September 2015 (UTC)
Okay, guys: How serious about this are we? I see some comments here that may degenerate into my-link-is-better-than-your-link, but the fact is that nobody has the overall data.
There is a kludge that will let us see how often links in navboxes get clicked on, if we really want the information. It won't let us separate search engine spiders from real humans, but it will let us get page view counts for clicking a link in a navbox vs other ways of reaching the page. It's not elegant, and it's got some small WP:PERF costs, so we shouldn't do this on a grand scale, but we could certainly try it out for a small number of links in one or two navboxes.
Is that interesting to you? More to the point, is it interesting enough to two or three editors to do the work involved? It'll take an hour to pick templates and links, an hour to set it up, a few minutes each day to check the links for problems/potential corruption, and (after a few weeks or so) an hour to revert the whole setup, and an hour or two to collect the data and write it up. Whether anybody uses these navboxes would actually be a useful thing for WPMED to know, and the results would probably be more or less applicable to all subject areas at the English Wikipedia. But it takes sustained work over the course of a month, and there's no point in starting if the project won't be finished. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 19:10, 24 September 2015 (UTC)
Here are my suggestions for how to fix the template creep in the articles covered by this project. They go beyond my initial point about index templates, but that is necessary because the index templates themselves were designed to fix template creep. I think the suggestions below are consistent with the principles behind good navbox design.
I would also recommend removing those templates that duplicate lists of ICD-9 codes and ICD-10 codes and replace them by links to those lists in See also. In general, these templates are long and intricate, and the information is better presented as a list. RockMagnetist( talk) 16:09, 27 September 2015 (UTC)
My approach. Without fully having read the analysis TL;DR, I just drop a suggestion.
@ DePiep, RockMagnetist while we are experimenting with what to do in terms of drafts, I propose concurrently that we move all these index boxes into template space by moving them into the "noinclude" second of each template.
This can be done at the same time as other editing, and means they won't be displayed to end users. They will however retain their useful purpose for template editing as I have previously explained. -- Tom (LT) ( talk) 20:22, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
I am creating this so we can at least centralise discussion. This option proposes that we simply delete all the navboxes. -- Tom (LT) ( talk) 20:22, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
On day one of removed templates, one has already been replaced with another series of links [5]. Would it be worth emulating this on all the navboxes, or providing a series of links (as you two mention above) in navboxes? I am personally not in favour of this in view of the discussions we've had above, but if other editors are going to do this piecemeal we should discuss it. Thoughts? -- Tom (LT) ( talk) 23:36, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
P i n g s so that you'll all know that this discussion has moved here. Please be liberal in pinging me (and other editors) for this discussion, since it's not the first page I visit every day (unlike WT:MED).
The description at User:Sebwite/navbox study is interesting, but old (pre-mobile), and User:Sebwite doesn't edit often any more, so we might not be able to get much information about it. Any other ideas? WhatamIdoing ( talk) 01:43, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
Before doing this kind of study, we should clarify what we are trying to find out. I am going to repeat the essence of an earlier post because I think it may have been overlooked:
This is hard data because any time someone clicks on a link in {{ Vascular navs}}, they visit a navbox. And it is an upper limit on their use because some people may have visited the navboxes by other routes, and they didn't necessarily use the links once they got there. This analysis is easy to repeat for any of the other index boxes. Even as an upper limit this is really low usage, so I don't see what more we need to know about index boxes; maybe we should refocus our investigations on the regular navboxes. RockMagnetist( talk) 17:31, 8 October 2015 (UTC)
A few years ago i did a major update of the medicine navs with a.o @DePiep and @Tom (LT). I see there's been a nice cleanup since then. What's the current status? Anything an editor with a humble academic medical background can contribute for the navboxes at the moment? PizzaMan ( ♨♨) 20:36, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
Nearly all of the pages that link to
Template:Bone and cartilage navs are themselves templates. And they seem to link to it without any problems. One non-Template page that links to it is
Draft:Bone Malrotation, where the Wikitext {{Template:Bone and cartilage navs}}
generates two link errors, a Stripped tags for </div>
and a missing end tag for <div>
. The problem doesn't go away by removing "Template:".
Template:Bone_and_cartilage_navs/doc says, "This is an embedded medical navbox." If that means that it should not be used anywhere except in another navbox, will someone please edit the doc file and say this, so users and editors will be less likely to use it outside navboxes and more easily diagnose misuse. If it is permitted to use this template outside of navboxes, then why is it causing lint errors at
Draft:Bone Malrotation? —
Anomalocaris (
talk) 05:28, 6 June 2019 (UTC)
Update: I edited Draft:Bone Malrotation, changing
{{Bone and cartilage navs}}
to
<div>{{Bone and cartilage navs}}</div>
and this fixed the lint errors, but my main request remains. — Anomalocaris ( talk) 21:54, 7 July 2019 (UTC)