Help talk:Style/Article summary templates

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Revision as of 15:55, 10 November 2013 by Kynikos (talk | contribs) (Deprecation of summaries and overviews: re)
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Original discussion

Article summary templates provide a place to sum up the content of the aricle. The problem is that, in my opinion, this conflicts with the text written in the first part of the articles, before the first heading, which is kind of used for the same purpose. You can see this even in the page I've linked at the beginning of the paragraph, and in Writing_Article_Introductions. I suggest that the summary should only be written as normal text before the first heading, and that Article summary templates should be used only to provide additional schematic introductory informations, like links to related articles (also note that this could conflict with "See also" sections), using the Overview templates, listing packages to download (like in Trinity) and so on. Writing Article Overviews and Writing Article Introductions should be edited in accordance, or maybe merged with this very article? (They actually talk about style) -- Kynikos 12:12, 3 May 2011 (EDT)

I never liked those summary templates and I prefer to have all the related links either in the article itself or at the bottom in the "See also" section. The introduction should have info like This is an article about foo. If you're looking for foo2, go to this page and if you want bar, go to this page. Examples GNOME v. GNOME 3, Virtualbox v. Arch Linux VirtualBox Guest. -- Karol 13:24, 3 May 2011 (EDT)
Would you definitively deprecate Article summary templates? It would KISS things up, I could agree.
Let's try to be concrete, otherwise discussions like this can last for eternity: I'm listing all the possible uses for Article summary (add more if you can think of others), then evaluate each briefly to see if it can be put back in the "normal flow" of the article:
  • Article summary:
it could easily (and I think should) be always substituted by the text before the first heading (which appears before the ToC);
  • Overview template:
more hardly replaceable, unless we just list its links in the See also section and get rid of the rest of the description; I don't like Overview templates very much, they could also be included in the normal summary at the beginning of the article;
  • Related articles and other links (Wikipedia articles, Series, Changelogs...):
easily mergeable with the See also section, anyway I don't know if I would like the opposite more;
  • Legal info:
This is rarely used (Fonts is the only occurrence I've found with a brief random search); it could be easily integrated in the normal flow;
  • List of packages:
Also rarely used (Trinity is the only occurrence I can think of at the moment); it could be integrated in the normal flow, though a long list would not look as good.
  • ...?
In the end, I would start removing the conflict for the summary itself, and then take care of the rest, also because a lot of articles make use of these templates in various ways.
As always the last word will come from the administrators. -- Kynikos 17:54, 3 May 2011 (EDT)
In my mind, the introduction should be used to describe the topic of the article whereas the summary should be used to describe the structure and scope of the article. E.g. Introduction: X is an application that turns your computer into a killer robot. Summary: This article covers installation and configuration of X. A slight distinction, I will admit. (Analogy: abstract versus introduction in research articles).
I created the overview templates as a way to add context to the related articles. Yes, article X is related to Y, but in what way? I also prefer seeing related links at the beginning rather than the end of articles.
-- pointone 23:03, 4 May 2011 (EDT)
Well I agree about the links: as we are trying to standardize the style you could consider approving to move all links from See also and External links sections to the Summary box.
About introduction and summary, I still think the difference is really too subtle to be noticed and applied in all the articles without having to puzzle over what to write where. We should think well if it really gives an advantage to have the two kind of text separated; also IMHO the purpose of the summary, as you have descripted it, is almost completely fulfilled by the Table of Contents. -- Kynikos 10:36, 5 May 2011 (EDT)
I’m not really a fan of these floating templates either. I tend to start reading a page sequentially, at least until I get a feel for what the page is about and decide if I am reading the right page or not. I ignore these sort of floating boxes because they don’t visually have a place in the main text sequence. I often just assume that if they contained important information, that information would be present in the main body as well. Perhaps I would take more notice of these templates if they were on the left (since I read from left to right), but on the other hand perhaps that would make me even more annoyed at the pages that use those templates :P.
How do the templates help add context to related articles? Vadmium 06:13, 1 August 2011 (EDT).
I was referring to the so-called overview templates such as Template:Package management overview. I believe this adds context to related articles rather than simply saying "See also: pacman, Arch Build System, PKGBUILD, etc." However, the overviews can be moved to respective category pages, as touched upon in #A crazy idea (about Summary templates, Overview templates and categories). -- pointone 14:18, 22 September 2011 (EDT)

Is the Article Summary to be optional or required (mandatory) on every article? And if it's optional, the choice is purely based on authors' preferences or do we suggest some guidelines? -- Kynikos 07:02, 17 September 2011 (EDT)

I am neither for nor against the summary templates. The majority of users (here) are against them, so it would seem. -- pointone 14:18, 22 September 2011 (EDT)
Honestly, I would really like to deprecate every summary template except for the overviews, and I would finally implement #A crazy idea (about Summary templates, Overview templates and categories): I read it again, and my own words "This way every category would have a brief description, Overview templates would become unnecessary (merged with category pages), all (categorized) articles would have an almost automatic overview, and people would be more willing to categorize pages well" have convinced me again of the advantages of such a system. -- Kynikos 17:32, 22 September 2011 (EDT)
As a start, I suggest we move the existing overviews to their respective category pages -- I support this part of your idea. However, as for including category overviews in the article summary, what happens if a page belongs to multiple categories? -- pointone 18:21, 10 October 2011 (EDT)
Yeah I thought of that case, the article would just get multiple stacked overviews (I think it would be desirable, after all, and overviews shouldn't be 500-word texts, just brief descriptions). If however one wants to avoid displaying the overview of some categories, he can still use the normal categorization syntax.
Are we moving the existing overviews in their cat pages even if we've not yet reached a decision about the whole change?
-- Kynikos 19:02, 10 October 2011 (EDT)
I like having the overviews in articles. The overview gives good information for wrapping your head around a new topic and having access to the most important related articles, and I often enjoy getting this info right after reading the intro. There isn't much of a place for overview-like material elsewhere in the article either, so I'd like if these stayed. Also, many of the most related links in the summary template can be incorporated into a good overview. Emiralle 13:17, 15 October 2011 (EDT)
Don't worry, we're just discussing where to keep the source text of overviews, whether in templates or in proper categories, but in the articles the overviews will be displayed as always. -- Kynikos 13:21, 15 October 2011 (EDT)
Right. Well in that case I'm happy with them moving to category pages as well. Many categories don't have much (or any) descriptive writing so that would kill two birds with one stone. Emiralle 13:27, 15 October 2011 (EDT)
Ok, I'm trying this. -- Kynikos 15:04, 15 October 2011 (EDT)
This part is implemented, the source texts of the 5 currently existing overview templates have been moved to relevant categories. The templates themselves however are still there.
Related changes are [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10]. -- Kynikos 15:43, 15 October 2011 (EDT)

A crazy idea (about Summary templates, Overview templates and categories)

[Brainstorming mode ON]I don't even know if this could be feasible at all, but what if we could instruct the Article summary template to "read" (with an internal inclusion like those in the Beginners' Guide?) a specific standard section in each Category page that the article belongs to? That standard section would contain a description of the category, and that could somewhat replace the Overview templates. (How hard it is to explain insane ideas, further clarifications could follow)[Brainstorming mode OFF]. -- Kynikos 12:43, 3 May 2011 (EDT)

This is an example: looking at the code, I have used Template:Graphical user interface overview, but with this method its text would be in the includable section (Overview) of the Category, and would be included (automatically with some template hacking?) in the Summary template field:

Lorem Ipsum

Category: Desktop environments

{{:Category:Desktop environments}} (Would this work?)

Template:Graphical user interface overview

Related

External links

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin egestas, magna non sollicitudin commodo, sapien elit semper sapien, adipiscing consectetur nisi ipsum ut elit. Sed ac neque ut nulla tempor porttitor. Mauris interdum. Cras feugiat sodales nibh. Proin neque turpis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin egestas, magna non sollicitudin commodo, sapien elit semper sapien, adipiscing consectetur nisi ipsum ut elit. Sed ac neque ut nulla tempor porttitor. Mauris interdum. Cras feugiat sodales nibh. Proin neque turpis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin egestas, magna non sollicitudin commodo, sapien elit semper sapien, adipiscing consectetur nisi ipsum ut elit. Sed ac neque ut nulla tempor porttitor. Mauris interdum. Cras feugiat sodales nibh. Proin neque turpis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin egestas, magna non sollicitudin commodo, sapien elit semper sapien, adipiscing consectetur nisi ipsum ut elit. Sed ac neque ut nulla tempor porttitor. Mauris interdum. Cras feugiat sodales nibh. Proin neque turpis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin egestas, magna non sollicitudin commodo, sapien elit semper sapien, adipiscing consectetur nisi ipsum ut elit. Sed ac neque ut nulla tempor porttitor. Mauris interdum. Cras feugiat sodales nibh. Proin neque turpis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin egestas, magna non sollicitudin commodo, sapien elit semper sapien, adipiscing consectetur nisi ipsum ut elit. Sed ac neque ut nulla tempor porttitor. Mauris interdum. Cras feugiat sodales nibh. Proin neque turpis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin egestas, magna non sollicitudin commodo, sapien elit semper sapien, adipiscing consectetur nisi ipsum ut elit. Sed ac neque ut nulla tempor porttitor. Mauris interdum. Cras feugiat sodales nibh. Proin neque turpis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin egestas, magna non sollicitudin commodo, sapien elit semper sapien, adipiscing consectetur nisi ipsum ut elit. Sed ac neque ut nulla tempor porttitor. Mauris interdum. Cras feugiat sodales nibh. Proin neque turpis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin egestas, magna non sollicitudin commodo, sapien elit semper sapien, adipiscing consectetur nisi ipsum ut elit. Sed ac neque ut nulla tempor porttitor. Mauris interdum. Cras feugiat sodales nibh. Proin neque turpis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin egestas, magna non sollicitudin commodo, sapien elit semper sapien, adipiscing consectetur nisi ipsum ut elit. Sed ac neque ut nulla tempor porttitor. Mauris interdum. Cras feugiat sodales nibh. Proin neque turpis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin egestas, magna non sollicitudin commodo, sapien elit semper sapien, adipiscing consectetur nisi ipsum ut elit. Sed ac neque ut nulla tempor porttitor. Mauris interdum. Cras feugiat sodales nibh. Proin neque turpis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin egestas, magna non sollicitudin commodo, sapien elit semper sapien, adipiscing consectetur nisi ipsum ut elit. Sed ac neque ut nulla tempor porttitor. Mauris interdum. Cras feugiat sodales nibh. Proin neque turpis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin egestas, magna non sollicitudin commodo, sapien elit semper sapien, adipiscing consectetur nisi ipsum ut elit. Sed ac neque ut nulla tempor porttitor. Mauris interdum. Cras feugiat sodales nibh. Proin neque turpis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin egestas, magna non sollicitudin commodo, sapien elit semper sapien, adipiscing consectetur nisi ipsum ut elit. Sed ac neque ut nulla tempor porttitor. Mauris interdum. Cras feugiat sodales nibh. Proin neque turpis.

Categories: Desktop environments

<noinclude>

Category:Desktop environments

Overview

</noinclude>

Template:Graphical user interface overview

<noinclude>

Subcategories

...

...

...

</noinclude>

This way every category would have a brief description, Overview templates would become unnecessary (merged with category pages), all (categorized) articles would have an almost automatic overview, and people would be more willing to categorize pages well. -- Kynikos 06:02, 5 May 2011 (EDT)

Ok, this definitely works: see Template:Sandbox, Category:Sandbox and Sandbox for an example (Note that Template:Sandbox has been edited meanwhile, so the examples don't work anymore at the moment. -- Kynikos 08:22, 15 May 2011 (EDT)). My suggestion would be an Article summary category template, or just Category to be put among Article summary templates; note that it automatically adds the page to the category, so it doesn't even duplicate its name in the source.
Template code:
<includeonly>{{Article summary heading|Category: {{{1}}}}}
{{Article summary text|[[Category:{{{1}}}]]{{:Category:{{{1}}}}}}}</includeonly>
Usage:
[[Category:My category]]

{{Article summary start}}
{{Article summary text|bla bla bla}}
{{Category|My category}}
{{Article summary heading|Other heading}}
{{Article summary text|bla bla bla 2}}
{{Article summary end}}
[[Category:My category]] is not needed at the top of the page. -- Kynikos 09:56, 5 May 2011 (EDT)
Of course if there's some category text that needs to be prevented from displaying in the template, it should be enclosed in <noinclude> tags (see the source of Category:Sandbox for an example). -- Kynikos 10:42, 5 May 2011 (EDT)
My original plan with respect to overviews was to include them on their related category pages (category summaries). I, too, thought of something similar, but realized that many existing categories are too broad. Consider Template:Access control overview, which includes pages under Category:Security. I also envision an "Encryption overview" which would fall under Category:Security. For this to work, we would need to split Category:Security -- not necessarily a bad thing, but I believe the template system provides more flexibility. -- pointone 20:41, 10 May 2011 (EDT)
All this idea was built on the assumption that if two articles need two different overviews, then they very likely belong to different categories (possibly in a parent-child relation) and vice versa: in your example there probably should be an Encryption category, child of Security. I still think that the flexibility given by the Overview template system has a (IMVHO too high) cost in terms of ease of use and maintenance, with respect to the category system, anyway as I said it was just brainstorming. -- Kynikos 08:58, 11 May 2011 (EDT)

See also or Related in Article Summary?

I think we'd better be coherent whether to keep links, references etc. either in a "See also" section at the bottom of the article, or in one (or more) boxes under the Article Summary at the top right of the article.

See also #Article summary templates.

-- Kynikos 15:15, 21 September 2011 (EDT)

This is more a reminder than other, but I'm starting to like the idea of adding the rule to keep related ArchWiki articles in the Article Summary box only, and external links in See also sections only. Well, this way the "See also" default may even be changed (with bots, don't worry!) to a non-imperative, descriptive title like "Additional resources", "External links" or something like that. -- Kynikos 07:06, 14 December 2011 (EST)
Also remember that many external links in summaries can be found with Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Article_summary_link. -- Kynikos 07:41, 24 January 2012 (EST)

Advantages of links in See also:

  • There is more space for link descriptions
  • It is likely one will read or skim the article before actively looking for additional reading material. This naturally leaves the reader at the end of the article. It is convenient for the reader in this case if links are at the end of the article. James Eder 00:29, 22 September 2011 (EDT)
  • It seems more common (elsewhere) to have links at the end of articles (when they are not inline with the rest of the text). Following common convention it may be better from a usability perspective. James Eder 00:29, 22 September 2011 (EDT)
    Especially for people used to Wikipedia, which uses the same wiki software. Vadmium 11:12, 26 October 2011 (EDT).
  • I am not sure how much we care about this but it having the links at the end could be more friendly to small form factor screens and screen readers. James Eder 00:29, 22 September 2011 (EDT)
  • As a section, "See also" gets its own TOC entry granting easy access from near the top of the article. Alternatively one may press the END key. James Eder 00:29, 22 September 2011 (EDT)
  • More formatting options here than in summary. Emiralle 13:12, 15 October 2011 (EDT)
  • More inclined to put external, or less closely related stuff here. Emiralle 13:12, 15 October 2011 (EDT)
  • See also section would not be skipped if you start reading the main text sequentially from the top. Vadmium.
  • [add more advantages...]

Advantages of links in Article Summary:

  • Immediately visible
  • Beyond some minor editing inconvenience, is there any real disadvantage of having the most interesting links in both locations? It could be advantageous for the reader to have some links in both locations. James Eder 00:29, 22 September 2011 (EDT)
  • I think putting very closely related links in the summary gives the topic more cohesion, and as James Eder said, they could be included at the bottom as well. Emiralle 13:12, 15 October 2011 (EDT)
  • It would theoretically be more effective in preventing duplication of content within the wiki, as (unexperienced) editors would have a clearer view of the articles where related content could already exist (true especially with series (or "rings") of articles on the same subject). -- Kynikos (talk) 02:46, 29 September 2013 (UTC)
  • [add more advantages...]

Deprecation of summaries and overviews

As discussed in #Original discussion, although article summaries were intended to have a different use from introductions, this difference is really too subtle to be understood by many, and this is reflected by the fact that in the vast majority of articles, if not in all of them, article summaries are misused, especially in two ways:

  • they substitute or duplicate the introduction
  • they provide a useless summary that is already evident by looking at the table of contents

Often an article summary is added only to justify the floated box in order to add related links, just click a few times on Special:Random and see for yourself.

Second, as touched on in ArchWiki:Requests#Mention UEFI boot loaders in the overview, overviews are hard to maintain and they seem an unnecessary complication, as a link to the main "overview" article would serve the purpose much better (Boot Loaders in that example), or, if an overview article is absent, an overview could be easily added to the article itself, e.g. in the introduction. Note that overviews are used very sparingly, so they can also be seen as a non-standard feature of our articles.

This discussion, therefore, intends to plan the deprecation of both article summaries and overviews, leaving the right-floated box only for related links.

Now, there would be 2 * 2 main ways to implement this:

1. Create a single Template:Related links template, that will host the links as its first argument

2. Create two templates, Template:Related links start, Template:Related links end that start and end the floated div, just like Template:Article summary start and Template:Article summary end

A. Create a Template:Related template in order to induce users to use a standard formatting

B. Allow content to be liberally added to the floated box

1A:

{{Related links|
{{Related|Link A}}
{{Related|Link B}}
{{Related|Link C}}
}}

1B:

{{Related links start}}
{{Related|Link A}}
{{Related|Link B}}
{{Related|Link C}}
{{Related links end}}

2A:

{{Related links|
[[Link A]]

[[Link B]]

[[Link C]]
}}

2B:

{{Related links start}}
[[Link A]]

[[Link B]]

[[Link C]]
{{Related links end}}

My preference goes to 1B.

I would be very strict and only allow simple internal links in the floated box, so no alternative link anchor, no link descriptions, no external links, no subheadings... That kind of links should only be used in "See also" sections. Of course any opposing opinions will be considered.

-- Kynikos (talk) 05:30, 10 November 2013 (UTC) (EDIT: Kynikos (talk) 06:30, 10 November 2013 (UTC))

My preference is 2B. It support [[fstab (简体中文)|fstab]] which is more clean. -- Fengchao (talk) 13:05, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
Good point, I didn't think of language tags. I'd prefer using a Related template in order to discourage exotic uses of the floated box, and also because otherwise links should be separated by blank lines, or <br> tags, or listed with bullet points, all solutions that look ugly to me.
My compromise proposal is localized Related templates:
{{Related articles start (简体中文)}}
{{Related (简体中文)|Link A}}
{{Related (简体中文)|Link B}}
{{Related (简体中文)|Link C}}
{{Related articles end (简体中文)}}
this would also allow using localized shortcut redirects:
{{Related articles start (简体中文)}}
{{zh-CN shortcut|Link A}}
{{zh-CN shortcut|Link B}}
{{zh-CN shortcut|Link C}}
{{Related articles end (简体中文)}}
Note that the Related_articles_start/end templates should need localized versions in any case. -- Kynikos (talk) 15:55, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Procedure

Once the deprecation plan is approved, the steps for the transition are:

  1. Create the new templates
  2. Replace the documentation in all article summary and overview templates with warnings about their deprecation
  3. Update the relevant Help articles: Help:Style, Category:Template...
  4. Update the most important articles so that they will be taken as examples by everybody
  5. Slowly update all the other articles, no need to rush this step; of course there's no way to do it with a bot, as there are too many variables
  6. Delete all article summary and overview templates

For each article:

  • If there's no introduction, just use the article summary
  • If there are both an introduction and a summary, merge the summary into the introduction, or just delete it if completely useless
  • If there's an overview, either copy it in the introduction, or, better, simply replace it with related links
  • Restyle all the existing related links to use the new formatting
  • Any other type of content should be moved to the article body, for example the "See also" section

A list of the articles currently using an article summary box can be found at Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Article summary start. Note that they are really a lot, use Special:MostLinkedTemplates for following the countdown.

-- Kynikos (talk) 05:30, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
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