This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Illinois template. |
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Illinois Template‑class | |||||||
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Since the other two regions are named with colloquialisms, why isn't Champaign-Urbana? Thesquire 08:01, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Hi, I have heard many people complain about the size of this template. I thought that maybe it can be condensed into a much thinner form. I think it is unnecessary for us to include anything except for the subcategories. If we have a link to "Counties of Illinois", we dont have it list the countie, it just makes the template too big. This format will also allow us to include links to other general illinois-related topics (ie. Hiistory). We can play around with the design, but I think changing it is important. The reason I bring this up is because while conducting a peer review of Chicago, someone commented that the templates at the bottom (Illinois and Chicago) were much too big. This is true on the Chicago page, but even more true on smaller articles, I do not think the template should be twice the size of the text. I have already made a similar change to the Chicago template. As Agriculture kindly pointed out to me, other states use this format too, however I dont think the templates needs to be homogenous and this change woud very much behouve the entire set of Illinois articles. Tell me what you think. -- Gpyoung talk 02:55, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
I have tried my hand at reformatting the Illinois template so it wont look so big on smaller articles and can be paired with other templates (ie. Chicago, Chicagoland) without taking up so much space at the bottom of an article. I have not removed any content, I have only tried to reduce wasted space. I hope it works. -- Gpyoung talk 17:58, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
Sure, that looks fine to me, make any changes you see fit. That was just my attempt, I am not the best at formatting. If you want, just go ahead and put yours as the template. I know you showed it to me before, but I completely forgot about it. -- Gpyoung talk 04:49, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
I redid the template based on the California template (As Sept. 24, 2005), which uses alternating colors to make the information easier to read. I replaced the California template's colors with the colors of the United States template. ("toccolors" and "lightsteelblue"). I didn't change any existing information. Lovelac7 20:49, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. states/state templates lists and displays all 50 U.S. state (and additional other) templates. It potentially can be used for ideas and standardization. // MrD9 07:16, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
There is currently an ongoing discussion regarding standardization of state templates (primarily regarding layout and styling) at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. states/state templates. An effort was made earlier this year to standardize Canadian province templates (which mostly succeeded). Lovelac7 and I have already begun standardizing all state templates. If you have any concerns, they should be directed toward the discussion page for state template standardization. Thanks! — Webdinger BLAH | SZ 22:43, 27 August 2006 (UTC)
Let's try to limit it to places over 20,000 population or so, or places expected to reach that level by 2010. Thanks. :) 131.156.238.75 17:25, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, a village is any place that is incorporated as a village and has elected trustees and a village president which serve the village as a whole (no wards/districts). Arlington Heights and Schaumburg, with populations over 70,000, are some of Illinois' largest villages.
A city is a place that is incorporated as a city and has elected aldermen which serve different wards of the city, as well as a mayor, who usually has more authoritative power than a village president.
I believe most of the places listed as villages are indeed villages and most of the places listed as cities are indeed cities. If you do happen to find an error in the distinctions, please let me know.
Another option would be to section the template off by population size (i.e. 100,000+, 50,000-100,000, 25,000-50,000, etc.), however I think this would take up more space than the current format. 131.156.238.75 03:59, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
To Dual Freq: You can’t simply remove all towns and villages from the page, just because many are included on another template. What if someone were to create a Central Illinois template? Then it would be redundant to have those places listed on the Illinois template as well, wouldn’t it? Then there would be no cities left on the Illinois template. Additionally, several villages are important to Illinois as a whole. Did you know that Schaumburg is 2nd only to Chicago as far as Illinois economics goes? Or how about Cicero having more people than Champaign, even though it was incorporated as a town. You simply can’t omit these places that are important to Illinois as a whole, simply because they’re located in Chicagoland.
To Telos: I disagree with the standardization of state templates to only include cities over 50,000. It may work for California and Texas, but for the rest of the states, it just doesn’t cut it. The whole purpose of a navigational template is so that you can navigate to the important pages associated with that topic. How can you have an Illinois template and remove the sites of Illinois’ second and third largest universities (DeKalb and Carbondale), well-known independent manufacturing cities (Freeport and Galesburg), important suburbs that have suburbs of their own (Crystal Lake, St. Charles), and so forth. Also, lumping them all together as cities is inaccurate, since some are cities while some are not. I thought Wikipedia is supposed to be professional, yet including the Village of Hoffman Estates or the Village of Schaumburg under the title “cities” is inaccurate and unprofessional. I have worked on this template for a long time, trying to fine-tune it to the appropriate level it was at. To come in and recklessly standardize it to standards that make templates pointless and difficult to use, non-representational of the State, inaccurate, and unprofessional is completely irresponsible. Abog 21:21, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
This template is a huge mass of links sitting at the bottom of a lot of Illinois related pages. Please, tell me to the reason we need 40+ "Towns" and "villages" on this template. What is the criteria for inclusion or exclusion from this important list? Is this population based? Is this a top 40 largest list? Is this a list of "My favorite cities"? What value do these links add when placed at the bottom of pages like: Adams County, Illinois, Alexander County, Illinois, Bond County, Illinois? Looking at the Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. states/state templates, I don't see many that are larger than this template. If you still want to include this list, please let me know the inclusion criteria so that I can make sure it reflects the entire state. -- Dual Freq 00:45, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
If you want MSAs then remove the towns and cities and just link the MSAs. That would make the list even shorter. -- Dual Freq 04:24, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
Is it time to get the sock puppets out to do a 4th revert? I'm not impressed. -- Dual Freq 05:29, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
My ideal template? One that doesn't fill the entire screen and lists a reasonable number of municipalities, say 10 to 20 and worth using on many Illinois related pages, yet not so large as to take over the entire page. I'm willing to compromise at 50,000+ pop per 2000 census as listed here, which has about 27. The template is easily supplemented by other lists that are more specific by area as illustrated by the DuPage County, Illinois and Ogle County, Illinois article which contains two other templates that are pertinent to that area. My secondary ideal would be that as soon as I mention 3RR, no anons drop in and revert. That seems very suspicious to me. The 2000 census seems most fair as all municipalities were counted, while interim ones only counted select locations. -- Dual Freq 21:21, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
Lmbst says it best: "of course, this introduces some subjectivity." Well, in that case, we may well march on adding anything we please. Inform all the "village" mayors -- they'ed be delighted to see their two-houses-and-a-gas-station cities added in too. I mean, someone has to live in all these places, so clearly they're ALL enourmously important and template-worthy. I think not. Subjectivity is for travel guides and movie reviews, not Wikipedia.
I also agree with Abog in that "every state is different, and what may work for one state may not work for another." It does not work for users of the Illinois template to have to muck through the 75+ cities we would have if we fixed the population bar at 25,000. Abog's solution, however, is to include only the 'important' cities and towns. Quite beyond the obvious problem of how to determine importance, this also leads to the exclusion of larger suburbs in favour of 'interesting' smaller communities with far fewer people. Most users see no reason to jump from Lake in the Hills to Elk Grove Village, and in any case, the counties already included in the template should direct anyone searching for more information to a more specific list.
I also happen to disapprove of sockpuppetry to get in that crucial fourth revert -- it not only lowers credibility to do something so desperate, but it's also hideously cliché. This breach of Wiki policy should be kept in mind when evaluating Abog's other contributions. Telos 22:55, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
As for the template, I agree with Lmbstl, that it is supposed to be a picture of the state, and is supposed to be representational of the State. Of course, the only way to avoid subjectivity is by doing it based on population. And for your information, special censuses (at least in these cases) DO count all residents.
I feel templates are not for cosmetic purposes, and are for navigational purposes, and it wouldn't be out-of-the-ordinary for someone looking at the Peoria page, wanting to navigate to the Moline page, and from there to the Galesburg page, and maybe from there to the Quincy page, and back to Springfield. Additionally, it wouldn't be out-of-the-ordinary for someone looking at the Rockford page wanting to navigate to the Crystal Lake page, then over to the Algonquin page, and then maybe over to the Bartlett page, then over to the Elgin page, and down to the St. Charles page, and over to West Chicago. These manuevers would be impossible to do without the 25,000K threshold limit.
I think the solution would be rather to get rid of the Chicagoland template, and simply just have county and state templates at the bottom of the page.
As Lmbstl said, a 50K limit is too high, and doesn't give users an accurate glimpse of the State or allow users to easily navigate. I mean, we're talking a few cenimeters here. From my perspective, removing 50 cities serves no purpose, and the drawbacks (harder to navigate, not representative of the State) of this action significantly outweigh the benefits (shortening the template a few cenimeters for cosmetic reasons). From my viewpoint, as long as the template fits within the screen, it isn't too big. Additionally, they're at the bottom of the page anyway. Abog 03:03, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
Quickly following each other's edits? You violate 3RR with an anon IP and you tell me that several hours separation is quickly? What is your definition of quickly? The closest edit I can see is 4 hours. Please, don't try my patience, your lucky I don't file a 3RR report on you. My opinion is that this template follow the 50k+ per 2000 census guideline for state templates. The only part of this template I've found useful has been the county and list links, but if you want 75 or 200 cities listed, do whatever you want. It's obviously your template, right? You own this template, so do whatever you want, don't worry about guidelines or other opinions. -- Dual Freq 03:30, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
Excuse me, but you're not being understanding and quick to assume the bad right away. I'm sorry, I often forget to login, and my computer was being slow so I had to restart it. Additionally, if you look at the history, whether I was logged in or not, I wouldn't be violating the 3RR.
What guideline are you referring to? The 50K threshold is only found on like four or five templates from what I've seen.
So far, you haven't really explained what purpose it does to remove valuable information from a template, other than it's not too long. So, you're going to recklessly remove 50 cities people would be likely to navigate to for the purpose of shortening a template a few cenimeters? Most articles have gobs of templates and stuff at the bottom anyway. Do you really think someone looking at the Chicagoland or Chicago articles are really going to care what the size of the template is, when they have a mile of templates to go through anyway? Is a few cenimeters really going to make a difference? No. But I can guarantee you they would prefer having templates down there that can actually allow them to easily navigate, instead of a bunch of templates that take them only to counties.
You complain about having to sift through 75 cities. Well, people have to sift through 102 counties as well. And I think people looking at Illinois articles would be more likely to want to navigate to a Galesburg, or a Moline, or a Crystal Lake, than say a Macoupin County or a Hardin County. That's not to say we shouldn't include all counties, however we should be balanced in our approach of including the right amount of cities vs. counties. Abog 03:50, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
Also, Rock Island is under 50,000 people...you might want to remove it. Just an example of how this ridiculous threshold level would cause both Rock Island and Moline to not be included on the ILLINOIS template. But no, you do whatever you want with this template now, since you seem so concerned about it. Keep hacking away! Might want to venture over to the Minnesota template while you're at it. Abog 04:04, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
Please also tell me where this standardization guideline is that you're referring to. I'd really like to see it, especially as most templates don't seem to follow it anyway. Abog 04:18, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
YES, for the purposes of navigational ease, standardization, elimination of subjectivity, and significance of the cities listed -- Telos 00:04, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
NO, for the purposes of navigational ease (so people can actually navigate to important Illinois cities like Moline, Rock Island, Danville, Belleville, DeKalb, Galesburg, Quincy, St. Charles, and Crystal Lake, just like people in Wisconsin and Indiana can navigate to 25K-50K cities), avoiding subjectivity, being representative of the State of Illinois, balancing the listing of 102 counties, being accurate (there's a difference between cities and villages and they link to different pages: Major cities and Major towns and villages), being in touch with geography (25,000 is a common major threshold in most maps and other geography-related materials), and so forth. It should also be noted that the new template would only be a centimeter or two shorter, but would deny users the navigation to 50 important cities and villages.
I'm also still waiting for proof that this supposed 50K standardization was actually something that was discussed and agreed upon by the Wikipedia community.
And this vote is ridiculous anyway, since it's pretty much 2 against 1 and I'm going to lose. I think dispute resolution would be more appropriate. Abog 02:12, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
What is wrong with trying to arrive at a concensus? Can we agree to try and do so?
First, using population count as a threshold for template inclusion is not sufficient. This has been the foundation for all these senseless arguments about the template. People are choosing an arbitrary population threshold that corresponds to the the size of template they prefer. This overlooks the purpose of the template-- if we can agree on the purpose of the template, then we can better arrive at its proper size-- NOT based on cosmetics but based on function. Can we agree to do this?
To provide a visual "menu" in order to easily access information about Illinois regions, counties, and cities, assuming that hte reader knows little about Illinois. I welcome thoughts and debate on this statement of purpose. -- Lmbstl 13:40, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
Idea 1: Keep only the "regions" or "counties" listing on the Illinois template, then have sub-templates for cities within the regions/counties. There are a couple of problems with this approach:
Idea 2: Whether listing cities on subtemplates or on the main Illinois template, there must be criteria for inclusion. If we have to go through city by city, then so be it. I propose that we use our energy to develop a set of criteria to allow a city inclusion into the template.
This is what I have been able to come up with:
If we want to inroduce numerical criteria, we can rate each quality on a scale of 1 - 7, with 7 being the highest. For example, the city of Chicago would rank as follows:
for a a top score of 21.
Decatur:
for a score of 13.
The above scoring may have to be evaluated within each region, I am not sure. What should be the threshold for inclusion? Let's debate the above criteria. This will decide the template. -- Lmbstl 13:40, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
Now, you're going to reduce it to the Top 20 Cities?!? Pretty much every state template has more than that. It's not fair that people in Wisconsin can navigate to Stevens Point and Manitowoc and people in Indiana can navigate to Richmond and Noblesville, but people in Illinois can't navigate to Moline and Danville. This is getting ridiculous.
Unless you plan on doing this to every state template, NO! Why is Illinois being singled out and having its listing of cities on its template reduced to practically nothing? All for the sake of two centimeters, right? Abog 03:14, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
Unfair oppression of the Illinois template? I haven't laughed that hard in a while. -- Dual Freq 04:04, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
What the hell? This is ridiculous...so you're going to reduce it even more to the Top 10 cities listed, and not have Champaign, Bloomington, Moline, or Schaumburg listed? And now you're talking of only including Chicago. For what purpose? No other state template is this ridiculously oppressed and recklessly vandalized. This isn't your template.
Additionally, I have compromised already by setting a limit at 25K, whereas before I was a bit more nonchalant. I might even be willing to compromise and not include Algonquin, L.I.T.H, Batavia, Romeoville, and Plainfield, since they weren't at 25K population in 2000. You, however, aren't willing to compromise, and keep cutting down the list even more to satisfy your personal preferences.
There is a general consensus among everyone else that we should come to some sort of compromise and that the template should be representational and include all of Illinois' major cities. I also don't see why you had to take out the link to "towns and villages"...now people have to go through like 3 pages just to access a listing of towns and villages. I'm trying to be realistic and user-friendly here. Not everyone's a geo-genius and has every Illinois county memorized and knows where to find Bloomington and Moline.
So enough of the psychological warfare, edit warring, and abuse of the Illinois template. Please justify your actions and try to work with the rest of the Wikipedia community on an appropriate compromise. Thank you. Abog 20:43, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
I agree with Telos that we need a fixed standard. Am I correct in understanding that the fixed standard for a city's inclusion in the template is a 2000 census count of 25K people or more? Is this the agreement? -- Lmbstl 08:12, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
Well, we have 70+ municipalities, I'm guessing 50 of them are in Chicagoland and there are none further south than Belleville. If the template is going to be that lopsided anyway, I see no reason to list more than 20 or 30 municipalities total. If it excludes a bunch of downstate localities, I'm willing to live with that so I don't have to see a list of 50+ Chicagoland cities on every Illinois related page. After all, both lists of cities and towns are linked, the regions are linked and the counties are linked. No one looking at this template or an article it's attached to, like Belleville, Springfield or Peoria is going to "need" to click on Dolton or Bartlett. If I knew nothing about Illinois, chances are the only city I could name would be Chicago anyway. The rest is not going to be learned from linking 78 cities on a template, it's going to be learned from the Illinois article, the regional articles or the county articles. There is no reason to list 78 municipalities in this template. -- Dual Freq 15:26, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
I know this is a huge can of worms and I apologize for bringing it up, but someone has to say it: Evanston, because of its cultural and educational contributions to the region and the nation, is on most non-Illinoisans' very short list of cities they would recognize in Illinois. Why Waukegan and not Evanston? Why Kankakee and not Evanston? I'm not angry about this, but I think it needs to be discussed. I think a reasonable out-of-state reader would expect to see Evanston on a "top 20" list of cities in Illinois. Even if population doesn't justify it there (what will 75,000 get you these days?), culture, history, politics and education probably ought to. ``` W i k i W i s t a h W a s s a p ``` 04:42, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
The current compromise was very hard to arrive at, and all the positive things noted about Evanston no doubt apply to other cities in Illinois that are not included. I certainly don't want to end up back to this version of the template. There is a very nice Template:Chicagoland that lists Evanston and appears at the bottom of a large number of articles. -- Dual Freq 05:14, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
16-Dec-2007: As the nav-box Template:Illinois continues to be expanded with more cities or topics, and transcluded into more articles, the Wikipedia indexing is becoming a so-called "N-squared problem" or more accurately an "NxM (N-by-M) problem": when 2,500 articles use a nav-box having 200 wikilinks, the overall effect generates 500,000 entries into the Wikipedia index-file database: the seemingly small nav-box (with just 200 city/region names and topics) snowballs into a massive half-million entries in the Wikipedia link-files database. Currently (16Dec07), Template:Illinois has 159 wikilinks and is used in over 1,865 pages, generating over 296,500 total wikilinks.
The problem is encouraged because some people treat nav-box templates as being shared subroutines or common menus, but they are not: in MediaWiki language 1.6, nav-box templates are actually copied as multiple instances for each page when used, rather than implemented as a shared common routine. If just 10 pages use a nav-box linking 150 cities/regions, that's 1,500 index entries, and the current result has become the 296,500 index entries already created by Template:Illinois. Solutions are being implemented to avoid the growing nav-box index crisis, as discussed below. - Wikid77 ( talk) 07:39, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
16-Dec-2007: As a quick solution to nav-box overlinking, the Template:Texas (since August 2007) no longer contains box links to the 254 counties in Texas (most of any state); instead, Template:Texas merely links the full-length counties article by "See: List of Texas counties". Although Template:Texas gives a simple solution reducing the nav-box crisis, it has the drawback of linking a very long article to provide county-name links, rather than a short nav-box template of county-names. Instead, I suggest using a condensed state-counties template for only counties of a state, similar to Template:Texas, but with only box links to county-names, avoiding a full-length article listing descriptions of all counties. Then, that kind of state-counties template (" Template:Illinois_counties") would only be transcluded into a few hundred articles about counties, rather than into 1,865. Meanwhile, each state-template could be substantially shortened (by using "See: Table of Illinois counties" to also reduce overall wikilinks by 173,000 or so), after a condensed state-counties template has been developed and verified, for each state. Long term, the general solution would be multiple smaller templates:
Other small templates can be added on future subjects.
Once the major cities have been moved to a separate template, separated from the numerous counties, there is then ample space to list, perhaps, the top 30 or 45 cities in the state, alleviating the "Top-25" restrictions debated in February 2007. Similar nav-box size problems have been debated for other states, during the past 3 years. For Illinois articles, using smaller templates could easily reduce the Wikipedia index-files database by over 230,000 wikilinks, while also reducing the daunting size of the bottom nav-boxes on smaller articles. - Wikid77 ( talk) 07:39, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
15-Feb-2008: After Template:Illinois is modified, Wikipedia has the massive task of reformatting all "caller" articles (about 1,873 pages) which invoke that template, so the page-links for "What links here" can be quick and more accurate. There is a delay of a few mintutes before the page-link database(s) begin being updated. When a template is edited & saved, then Wikipedia must begin the (often massive) task of re-indexing every page which uses that template. For just a few dozen articles, the Wikipedia servers might complete the reindexing of a template within 4 minutes; however, Template:Illinois is used in over 1,870 pages. Therefore, 1,870 pages must be reindexed, and that effort is delayed and spread out as a long-term task for the Wikipedia servers. The servers have a job queue of pending page updates, and sometimes that queue can have over a million jobs in the queue, such as indexing 1,870 pages for reformatting the modified template. With today's computers, there is a lot of processing power available to re-index 1,870 pages, over and over. However, if multiple changes could be carefully checked and combined as just 1 save operation, that would reduce the re-indexing to just 1,870 queued pages just once. If more changes are needed, that's okay, and Wikipedia servers will cope, but the effect of changing just one word should be considered. - Wikid77 ( talk) 08:39, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
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put in St. Charles/ Geneva and Crystal Lake/ McHenry/ Woodstock 98.228.248.239 ( talk) 00:57, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
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put Geneva next to St. Charles put McHenry and Woodstock next to Crystal Lake move Elk Grove Village next to Arlington Heights move Algonquin next to Elgin 104.1.25.40 ( talk) 01:48, 30 March 2014 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Illinois template. |
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Illinois Template‑class | |||||||
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Since the other two regions are named with colloquialisms, why isn't Champaign-Urbana? Thesquire 08:01, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Hi, I have heard many people complain about the size of this template. I thought that maybe it can be condensed into a much thinner form. I think it is unnecessary for us to include anything except for the subcategories. If we have a link to "Counties of Illinois", we dont have it list the countie, it just makes the template too big. This format will also allow us to include links to other general illinois-related topics (ie. Hiistory). We can play around with the design, but I think changing it is important. The reason I bring this up is because while conducting a peer review of Chicago, someone commented that the templates at the bottom (Illinois and Chicago) were much too big. This is true on the Chicago page, but even more true on smaller articles, I do not think the template should be twice the size of the text. I have already made a similar change to the Chicago template. As Agriculture kindly pointed out to me, other states use this format too, however I dont think the templates needs to be homogenous and this change woud very much behouve the entire set of Illinois articles. Tell me what you think. -- Gpyoung talk 02:55, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
I have tried my hand at reformatting the Illinois template so it wont look so big on smaller articles and can be paired with other templates (ie. Chicago, Chicagoland) without taking up so much space at the bottom of an article. I have not removed any content, I have only tried to reduce wasted space. I hope it works. -- Gpyoung talk 17:58, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
Sure, that looks fine to me, make any changes you see fit. That was just my attempt, I am not the best at formatting. If you want, just go ahead and put yours as the template. I know you showed it to me before, but I completely forgot about it. -- Gpyoung talk 04:49, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
I redid the template based on the California template (As Sept. 24, 2005), which uses alternating colors to make the information easier to read. I replaced the California template's colors with the colors of the United States template. ("toccolors" and "lightsteelblue"). I didn't change any existing information. Lovelac7 20:49, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. states/state templates lists and displays all 50 U.S. state (and additional other) templates. It potentially can be used for ideas and standardization. // MrD9 07:16, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
There is currently an ongoing discussion regarding standardization of state templates (primarily regarding layout and styling) at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. states/state templates. An effort was made earlier this year to standardize Canadian province templates (which mostly succeeded). Lovelac7 and I have already begun standardizing all state templates. If you have any concerns, they should be directed toward the discussion page for state template standardization. Thanks! — Webdinger BLAH | SZ 22:43, 27 August 2006 (UTC)
Let's try to limit it to places over 20,000 population or so, or places expected to reach that level by 2010. Thanks. :) 131.156.238.75 17:25, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, a village is any place that is incorporated as a village and has elected trustees and a village president which serve the village as a whole (no wards/districts). Arlington Heights and Schaumburg, with populations over 70,000, are some of Illinois' largest villages.
A city is a place that is incorporated as a city and has elected aldermen which serve different wards of the city, as well as a mayor, who usually has more authoritative power than a village president.
I believe most of the places listed as villages are indeed villages and most of the places listed as cities are indeed cities. If you do happen to find an error in the distinctions, please let me know.
Another option would be to section the template off by population size (i.e. 100,000+, 50,000-100,000, 25,000-50,000, etc.), however I think this would take up more space than the current format. 131.156.238.75 03:59, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
To Dual Freq: You can’t simply remove all towns and villages from the page, just because many are included on another template. What if someone were to create a Central Illinois template? Then it would be redundant to have those places listed on the Illinois template as well, wouldn’t it? Then there would be no cities left on the Illinois template. Additionally, several villages are important to Illinois as a whole. Did you know that Schaumburg is 2nd only to Chicago as far as Illinois economics goes? Or how about Cicero having more people than Champaign, even though it was incorporated as a town. You simply can’t omit these places that are important to Illinois as a whole, simply because they’re located in Chicagoland.
To Telos: I disagree with the standardization of state templates to only include cities over 50,000. It may work for California and Texas, but for the rest of the states, it just doesn’t cut it. The whole purpose of a navigational template is so that you can navigate to the important pages associated with that topic. How can you have an Illinois template and remove the sites of Illinois’ second and third largest universities (DeKalb and Carbondale), well-known independent manufacturing cities (Freeport and Galesburg), important suburbs that have suburbs of their own (Crystal Lake, St. Charles), and so forth. Also, lumping them all together as cities is inaccurate, since some are cities while some are not. I thought Wikipedia is supposed to be professional, yet including the Village of Hoffman Estates or the Village of Schaumburg under the title “cities” is inaccurate and unprofessional. I have worked on this template for a long time, trying to fine-tune it to the appropriate level it was at. To come in and recklessly standardize it to standards that make templates pointless and difficult to use, non-representational of the State, inaccurate, and unprofessional is completely irresponsible. Abog 21:21, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
This template is a huge mass of links sitting at the bottom of a lot of Illinois related pages. Please, tell me to the reason we need 40+ "Towns" and "villages" on this template. What is the criteria for inclusion or exclusion from this important list? Is this population based? Is this a top 40 largest list? Is this a list of "My favorite cities"? What value do these links add when placed at the bottom of pages like: Adams County, Illinois, Alexander County, Illinois, Bond County, Illinois? Looking at the Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. states/state templates, I don't see many that are larger than this template. If you still want to include this list, please let me know the inclusion criteria so that I can make sure it reflects the entire state. -- Dual Freq 00:45, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
If you want MSAs then remove the towns and cities and just link the MSAs. That would make the list even shorter. -- Dual Freq 04:24, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
Is it time to get the sock puppets out to do a 4th revert? I'm not impressed. -- Dual Freq 05:29, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
My ideal template? One that doesn't fill the entire screen and lists a reasonable number of municipalities, say 10 to 20 and worth using on many Illinois related pages, yet not so large as to take over the entire page. I'm willing to compromise at 50,000+ pop per 2000 census as listed here, which has about 27. The template is easily supplemented by other lists that are more specific by area as illustrated by the DuPage County, Illinois and Ogle County, Illinois article which contains two other templates that are pertinent to that area. My secondary ideal would be that as soon as I mention 3RR, no anons drop in and revert. That seems very suspicious to me. The 2000 census seems most fair as all municipalities were counted, while interim ones only counted select locations. -- Dual Freq 21:21, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
Lmbst says it best: "of course, this introduces some subjectivity." Well, in that case, we may well march on adding anything we please. Inform all the "village" mayors -- they'ed be delighted to see their two-houses-and-a-gas-station cities added in too. I mean, someone has to live in all these places, so clearly they're ALL enourmously important and template-worthy. I think not. Subjectivity is for travel guides and movie reviews, not Wikipedia.
I also agree with Abog in that "every state is different, and what may work for one state may not work for another." It does not work for users of the Illinois template to have to muck through the 75+ cities we would have if we fixed the population bar at 25,000. Abog's solution, however, is to include only the 'important' cities and towns. Quite beyond the obvious problem of how to determine importance, this also leads to the exclusion of larger suburbs in favour of 'interesting' smaller communities with far fewer people. Most users see no reason to jump from Lake in the Hills to Elk Grove Village, and in any case, the counties already included in the template should direct anyone searching for more information to a more specific list.
I also happen to disapprove of sockpuppetry to get in that crucial fourth revert -- it not only lowers credibility to do something so desperate, but it's also hideously cliché. This breach of Wiki policy should be kept in mind when evaluating Abog's other contributions. Telos 22:55, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
As for the template, I agree with Lmbstl, that it is supposed to be a picture of the state, and is supposed to be representational of the State. Of course, the only way to avoid subjectivity is by doing it based on population. And for your information, special censuses (at least in these cases) DO count all residents.
I feel templates are not for cosmetic purposes, and are for navigational purposes, and it wouldn't be out-of-the-ordinary for someone looking at the Peoria page, wanting to navigate to the Moline page, and from there to the Galesburg page, and maybe from there to the Quincy page, and back to Springfield. Additionally, it wouldn't be out-of-the-ordinary for someone looking at the Rockford page wanting to navigate to the Crystal Lake page, then over to the Algonquin page, and then maybe over to the Bartlett page, then over to the Elgin page, and down to the St. Charles page, and over to West Chicago. These manuevers would be impossible to do without the 25,000K threshold limit.
I think the solution would be rather to get rid of the Chicagoland template, and simply just have county and state templates at the bottom of the page.
As Lmbstl said, a 50K limit is too high, and doesn't give users an accurate glimpse of the State or allow users to easily navigate. I mean, we're talking a few cenimeters here. From my perspective, removing 50 cities serves no purpose, and the drawbacks (harder to navigate, not representative of the State) of this action significantly outweigh the benefits (shortening the template a few cenimeters for cosmetic reasons). From my viewpoint, as long as the template fits within the screen, it isn't too big. Additionally, they're at the bottom of the page anyway. Abog 03:03, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
Quickly following each other's edits? You violate 3RR with an anon IP and you tell me that several hours separation is quickly? What is your definition of quickly? The closest edit I can see is 4 hours. Please, don't try my patience, your lucky I don't file a 3RR report on you. My opinion is that this template follow the 50k+ per 2000 census guideline for state templates. The only part of this template I've found useful has been the county and list links, but if you want 75 or 200 cities listed, do whatever you want. It's obviously your template, right? You own this template, so do whatever you want, don't worry about guidelines or other opinions. -- Dual Freq 03:30, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
Excuse me, but you're not being understanding and quick to assume the bad right away. I'm sorry, I often forget to login, and my computer was being slow so I had to restart it. Additionally, if you look at the history, whether I was logged in or not, I wouldn't be violating the 3RR.
What guideline are you referring to? The 50K threshold is only found on like four or five templates from what I've seen.
So far, you haven't really explained what purpose it does to remove valuable information from a template, other than it's not too long. So, you're going to recklessly remove 50 cities people would be likely to navigate to for the purpose of shortening a template a few cenimeters? Most articles have gobs of templates and stuff at the bottom anyway. Do you really think someone looking at the Chicagoland or Chicago articles are really going to care what the size of the template is, when they have a mile of templates to go through anyway? Is a few cenimeters really going to make a difference? No. But I can guarantee you they would prefer having templates down there that can actually allow them to easily navigate, instead of a bunch of templates that take them only to counties.
You complain about having to sift through 75 cities. Well, people have to sift through 102 counties as well. And I think people looking at Illinois articles would be more likely to want to navigate to a Galesburg, or a Moline, or a Crystal Lake, than say a Macoupin County or a Hardin County. That's not to say we shouldn't include all counties, however we should be balanced in our approach of including the right amount of cities vs. counties. Abog 03:50, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
Also, Rock Island is under 50,000 people...you might want to remove it. Just an example of how this ridiculous threshold level would cause both Rock Island and Moline to not be included on the ILLINOIS template. But no, you do whatever you want with this template now, since you seem so concerned about it. Keep hacking away! Might want to venture over to the Minnesota template while you're at it. Abog 04:04, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
Please also tell me where this standardization guideline is that you're referring to. I'd really like to see it, especially as most templates don't seem to follow it anyway. Abog 04:18, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
YES, for the purposes of navigational ease, standardization, elimination of subjectivity, and significance of the cities listed -- Telos 00:04, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
NO, for the purposes of navigational ease (so people can actually navigate to important Illinois cities like Moline, Rock Island, Danville, Belleville, DeKalb, Galesburg, Quincy, St. Charles, and Crystal Lake, just like people in Wisconsin and Indiana can navigate to 25K-50K cities), avoiding subjectivity, being representative of the State of Illinois, balancing the listing of 102 counties, being accurate (there's a difference between cities and villages and they link to different pages: Major cities and Major towns and villages), being in touch with geography (25,000 is a common major threshold in most maps and other geography-related materials), and so forth. It should also be noted that the new template would only be a centimeter or two shorter, but would deny users the navigation to 50 important cities and villages.
I'm also still waiting for proof that this supposed 50K standardization was actually something that was discussed and agreed upon by the Wikipedia community.
And this vote is ridiculous anyway, since it's pretty much 2 against 1 and I'm going to lose. I think dispute resolution would be more appropriate. Abog 02:12, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
What is wrong with trying to arrive at a concensus? Can we agree to try and do so?
First, using population count as a threshold for template inclusion is not sufficient. This has been the foundation for all these senseless arguments about the template. People are choosing an arbitrary population threshold that corresponds to the the size of template they prefer. This overlooks the purpose of the template-- if we can agree on the purpose of the template, then we can better arrive at its proper size-- NOT based on cosmetics but based on function. Can we agree to do this?
To provide a visual "menu" in order to easily access information about Illinois regions, counties, and cities, assuming that hte reader knows little about Illinois. I welcome thoughts and debate on this statement of purpose. -- Lmbstl 13:40, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
Idea 1: Keep only the "regions" or "counties" listing on the Illinois template, then have sub-templates for cities within the regions/counties. There are a couple of problems with this approach:
Idea 2: Whether listing cities on subtemplates or on the main Illinois template, there must be criteria for inclusion. If we have to go through city by city, then so be it. I propose that we use our energy to develop a set of criteria to allow a city inclusion into the template.
This is what I have been able to come up with:
If we want to inroduce numerical criteria, we can rate each quality on a scale of 1 - 7, with 7 being the highest. For example, the city of Chicago would rank as follows:
for a a top score of 21.
Decatur:
for a score of 13.
The above scoring may have to be evaluated within each region, I am not sure. What should be the threshold for inclusion? Let's debate the above criteria. This will decide the template. -- Lmbstl 13:40, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
Now, you're going to reduce it to the Top 20 Cities?!? Pretty much every state template has more than that. It's not fair that people in Wisconsin can navigate to Stevens Point and Manitowoc and people in Indiana can navigate to Richmond and Noblesville, but people in Illinois can't navigate to Moline and Danville. This is getting ridiculous.
Unless you plan on doing this to every state template, NO! Why is Illinois being singled out and having its listing of cities on its template reduced to practically nothing? All for the sake of two centimeters, right? Abog 03:14, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
Unfair oppression of the Illinois template? I haven't laughed that hard in a while. -- Dual Freq 04:04, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
What the hell? This is ridiculous...so you're going to reduce it even more to the Top 10 cities listed, and not have Champaign, Bloomington, Moline, or Schaumburg listed? And now you're talking of only including Chicago. For what purpose? No other state template is this ridiculously oppressed and recklessly vandalized. This isn't your template.
Additionally, I have compromised already by setting a limit at 25K, whereas before I was a bit more nonchalant. I might even be willing to compromise and not include Algonquin, L.I.T.H, Batavia, Romeoville, and Plainfield, since they weren't at 25K population in 2000. You, however, aren't willing to compromise, and keep cutting down the list even more to satisfy your personal preferences.
There is a general consensus among everyone else that we should come to some sort of compromise and that the template should be representational and include all of Illinois' major cities. I also don't see why you had to take out the link to "towns and villages"...now people have to go through like 3 pages just to access a listing of towns and villages. I'm trying to be realistic and user-friendly here. Not everyone's a geo-genius and has every Illinois county memorized and knows where to find Bloomington and Moline.
So enough of the psychological warfare, edit warring, and abuse of the Illinois template. Please justify your actions and try to work with the rest of the Wikipedia community on an appropriate compromise. Thank you. Abog 20:43, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
I agree with Telos that we need a fixed standard. Am I correct in understanding that the fixed standard for a city's inclusion in the template is a 2000 census count of 25K people or more? Is this the agreement? -- Lmbstl 08:12, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
Well, we have 70+ municipalities, I'm guessing 50 of them are in Chicagoland and there are none further south than Belleville. If the template is going to be that lopsided anyway, I see no reason to list more than 20 or 30 municipalities total. If it excludes a bunch of downstate localities, I'm willing to live with that so I don't have to see a list of 50+ Chicagoland cities on every Illinois related page. After all, both lists of cities and towns are linked, the regions are linked and the counties are linked. No one looking at this template or an article it's attached to, like Belleville, Springfield or Peoria is going to "need" to click on Dolton or Bartlett. If I knew nothing about Illinois, chances are the only city I could name would be Chicago anyway. The rest is not going to be learned from linking 78 cities on a template, it's going to be learned from the Illinois article, the regional articles or the county articles. There is no reason to list 78 municipalities in this template. -- Dual Freq 15:26, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
I know this is a huge can of worms and I apologize for bringing it up, but someone has to say it: Evanston, because of its cultural and educational contributions to the region and the nation, is on most non-Illinoisans' very short list of cities they would recognize in Illinois. Why Waukegan and not Evanston? Why Kankakee and not Evanston? I'm not angry about this, but I think it needs to be discussed. I think a reasonable out-of-state reader would expect to see Evanston on a "top 20" list of cities in Illinois. Even if population doesn't justify it there (what will 75,000 get you these days?), culture, history, politics and education probably ought to. ``` W i k i W i s t a h W a s s a p ``` 04:42, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
The current compromise was very hard to arrive at, and all the positive things noted about Evanston no doubt apply to other cities in Illinois that are not included. I certainly don't want to end up back to this version of the template. There is a very nice Template:Chicagoland that lists Evanston and appears at the bottom of a large number of articles. -- Dual Freq 05:14, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
16-Dec-2007: As the nav-box Template:Illinois continues to be expanded with more cities or topics, and transcluded into more articles, the Wikipedia indexing is becoming a so-called "N-squared problem" or more accurately an "NxM (N-by-M) problem": when 2,500 articles use a nav-box having 200 wikilinks, the overall effect generates 500,000 entries into the Wikipedia index-file database: the seemingly small nav-box (with just 200 city/region names and topics) snowballs into a massive half-million entries in the Wikipedia link-files database. Currently (16Dec07), Template:Illinois has 159 wikilinks and is used in over 1,865 pages, generating over 296,500 total wikilinks.
The problem is encouraged because some people treat nav-box templates as being shared subroutines or common menus, but they are not: in MediaWiki language 1.6, nav-box templates are actually copied as multiple instances for each page when used, rather than implemented as a shared common routine. If just 10 pages use a nav-box linking 150 cities/regions, that's 1,500 index entries, and the current result has become the 296,500 index entries already created by Template:Illinois. Solutions are being implemented to avoid the growing nav-box index crisis, as discussed below. - Wikid77 ( talk) 07:39, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
16-Dec-2007: As a quick solution to nav-box overlinking, the Template:Texas (since August 2007) no longer contains box links to the 254 counties in Texas (most of any state); instead, Template:Texas merely links the full-length counties article by "See: List of Texas counties". Although Template:Texas gives a simple solution reducing the nav-box crisis, it has the drawback of linking a very long article to provide county-name links, rather than a short nav-box template of county-names. Instead, I suggest using a condensed state-counties template for only counties of a state, similar to Template:Texas, but with only box links to county-names, avoiding a full-length article listing descriptions of all counties. Then, that kind of state-counties template (" Template:Illinois_counties") would only be transcluded into a few hundred articles about counties, rather than into 1,865. Meanwhile, each state-template could be substantially shortened (by using "See: Table of Illinois counties" to also reduce overall wikilinks by 173,000 or so), after a condensed state-counties template has been developed and verified, for each state. Long term, the general solution would be multiple smaller templates:
Other small templates can be added on future subjects.
Once the major cities have been moved to a separate template, separated from the numerous counties, there is then ample space to list, perhaps, the top 30 or 45 cities in the state, alleviating the "Top-25" restrictions debated in February 2007. Similar nav-box size problems have been debated for other states, during the past 3 years. For Illinois articles, using smaller templates could easily reduce the Wikipedia index-files database by over 230,000 wikilinks, while also reducing the daunting size of the bottom nav-boxes on smaller articles. - Wikid77 ( talk) 07:39, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
15-Feb-2008: After Template:Illinois is modified, Wikipedia has the massive task of reformatting all "caller" articles (about 1,873 pages) which invoke that template, so the page-links for "What links here" can be quick and more accurate. There is a delay of a few mintutes before the page-link database(s) begin being updated. When a template is edited & saved, then Wikipedia must begin the (often massive) task of re-indexing every page which uses that template. For just a few dozen articles, the Wikipedia servers might complete the reindexing of a template within 4 minutes; however, Template:Illinois is used in over 1,870 pages. Therefore, 1,870 pages must be reindexed, and that effort is delayed and spread out as a long-term task for the Wikipedia servers. The servers have a job queue of pending page updates, and sometimes that queue can have over a million jobs in the queue, such as indexing 1,870 pages for reformatting the modified template. With today's computers, there is a lot of processing power available to re-index 1,870 pages, over and over. However, if multiple changes could be carefully checked and combined as just 1 save operation, that would reduce the re-indexing to just 1,870 queued pages just once. If more changes are needed, that's okay, and Wikipedia servers will cope, but the effect of changing just one word should be considered. - Wikid77 ( talk) 08:39, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
This
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put in St. Charles/ Geneva and Crystal Lake/ McHenry/ Woodstock 98.228.248.239 ( talk) 00:57, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
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put Geneva next to St. Charles put McHenry and Woodstock next to Crystal Lake move Elk Grove Village next to Arlington Heights move Algonquin next to Elgin 104.1.25.40 ( talk) 01:48, 30 March 2014 (UTC)