Template talk:Quickbar

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Usage

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Note: This usage information is out of date. See the documentation on Template:Quickbar for current instructions. -- LtPowers (talk) 18:56, 11 July 2013 (UTC)Reply

Capital Washington, D.C.
Currency US dollar (USD)
Population 293,027,571 (July 2004 est.)
Electricity 120V / 60Hz
Country code 1
Time zone UTC -5 to UTC -10

This template replaces the HTML quickbars previously used in country templates. To implement use the following format (note that the location, flag, and main images MUST NOT be wider than 250px):

{{quickbar| image=image_filename
| flag=flag_filename
| location=location_map_filename
| capital=[[Capital]]
| government=Type of government
| currency=Currency used
| area=Country area
| population=Population
| language=[[Language1]], [[Language2]], Language3, ...
| religion=Religion(s)
| electricity=Electrical voltage and current
| callingcode=Calling code
| tld=Internet top level domain
| timezone=Time zone(s) in relation to UTC
}}

Quickbar templates - request for comment

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Swept in from the Pub:

While trying to track down existing templates for the Project:Template index page I came across User:(WT-en) JanSlupski/Projects/QuickBar, which was an attempt to create templates to use for quickbars. The advantages cited were that this would bring some consistency to how quickbars are implemented, and it would be less intimidating for a user to see {{quickbar|title=""|population=""|etc}} then the current batch of HTML that begins most articles with quickbars. It would be good if others could comment on User talk:(WT-en) JanSlupski/Projects/QuickBar as to whether they think something like this is a good idea, specifically in light of the fact that the current template policy discourages template use, although (WT-en) Evan did recently indicate that his opinions of templates may be changing. -- (WT-en) Ryan 14:13, 3 April 2006 (EDT)

This gets a strong support from me. I think a really brief quickbar template at the top of the page is way easier to grok than the HTML we have now (which predates templates, and MediaWiki tables, by the way).
Question: is it worth writing a bot to change the 200+ country quickbars, or should be just do it as time goes by? Also: JanSlupski's quickbar uses a lot of items. I wonder if, with defaults in templates that we get with MediaWiki 1.6.x, we could cut it down to just one Template:Quickbar. --(WT-en) Evan 17:29, 17 April 2006 (EDT)
There is also Template:Country Quickbar, which looks a bit easier to use. If it's used I think that the name should be changed to just "Template:Quickbar" (as you suggested), and it should then be fairly easy to modify the single template to take default params. I don't have time right now to cobble something together, but if no one beats me to it I could do something later tonight.
As to writing a bot, I'm not sure that the syntax and headers are standard enough that it would be all that easy - it might be easier to kind of change as we go, and with only 200 or so quickbars the change shouldn't be too painful. -- (WT-en) Ryan 17:56, 17 April 2006 (EDT)
I've put together a Template:Quickbar. I've replaced the quickbar for the Falkland Islands and Italy with this template. Let me know if you have any comments. -- (WT-en) Ryan 01:43, 18 April 2006 (EDT)
I tried it out on Picardie, which was a mess before. -- (WT-en) Jonboy 14:03, 18 April 2006 (EDT)
Thanks - it looks like a lot of whitespace is being added, so I'll see if I can fix that. Additionally, do we need the capability to add lists of regions to the quickbar? Currently "departements" is not a supported parameter, but that could be changed if it's something people want to see in the quickbars. My personal feeling is that region lists belong in the main article, but I don't feel so strongly about it that I wouldn't want to change the template if others wanted it changed. -- (WT-en) Ryan 14:30, 18 April 2006 (EDT)
I don't think we need regions in the quickbar, but based on my experience on Wikipedia, it would be nice to have an optional editor-defined item, to allow the inclusion of some factoid that doesn't apply in most cases, but is interesting and relevant to a specific location (e.g. national anthem: "Freebird". To implement it, the template would need to take two parameters: the name of the element and the data for it.
I'm concerned about shortening the name of the template to just "Quickbar". If this is the only kind of quickbar we're going to have, it's fine, but what about templates for other kinds of articles (e.g. cities, itineraries, parks)? If so, maybe "Quickcountry" or something would be more flexibile. The alternative would be to make one quickbar template that can take all kinds of parameters and ignore the irrelevant ones, but I think separate templates would be easier to grok (and to customize, such as color coding). - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 15:15, 18 April 2006 (EDT)
Responding to Todd's comment above (indentation level was getting a bit deep), it would be pretty easy to add a couple of user-defined headings - for example "heading1=National Anthem", "value1=Freebird", "heading2=", "value2=". I'm not sure if that's the preferred approach, so I'll wait until someone else chimes in before making any changes.
In terms of naming, my personal preference would be to avoid the proliferation of templates that has occurred on Wikipedia by starting out with just one "Quickbar" template. If needed in the future we can always create new types of quickbars, but I don't think it hurts to have one general quickbar now. The current HTML quickbars are implemented with some consistency on country pages, region pages, state pages, and possibly even on a few city pages, so having a "general" quickbar template seems to be reasonable way to encompass how quickbars are currently used on the site. -- (WT-en) Ryan 17:09, 18 April 2006 (EDT)

Quickbar for States

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Way back I put a quick bar on three of the US states. Maine, Arkansas and Oklahoma and maybe another one or two. I can't remember for sure if there where more. I kind of like it, but I would prefer to get a consensus before moving and doing more. And, if there is a consensus to do this I am thinking the best way would be to have a template. All three of the states were the same to start, but wikitravlers have made a couple of changes on the one in Oklahoma. Let me know what you think. If consensus is not to do this, I would be happy to remove the one's I put in place. Thanks. -- (WT-en) Tom Holland (xltel) 16:29, 7 June 2006 (EDT)

For what it's worth, something similar has been done for regions of France, e.g. Champagne-Ardenne. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 17:14, 7 June 2006 (EDT)
Also, before creating another template, what different fields are needed for states? It should be pretty simple to add new fields to this template, and we could also fairly easily add support for a few generic fields to allow users to define their own heading. -- (WT-en) Ryan 17:34, 7 June 2006 (EDT)
To be frank, I'm not a fan of including "state flower" and such on travel articles... that kind of elementary-school-geography info isn't as relevant to me as a potential traveler as the preferred languages, gods, and voltages of a country I might be visiting. Area codes are more practical info, but as soon as a state has more than one or two it doesn't do much good to list them. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 17:54, 7 June 2006 (EDT)
I've removed the quickbars from the French regions, and I think it would be prudent to do the same for the US states as well. My reasoning is similar to Todd's - aside from timezone and area code (if not more than one), the information provided really isn't all that useful for travel, and it can be tough to then draw the line. For example, is it appropriate to create a quickbar for any region? For cities? What then goes in the quickbar? Perhaps in the future if there are some guidelines created about what is valid information for a quickbar then we can revisit this issue, but for now I think the information is better off in the main article for non-country articles. I'll hold off on making further changes to allow others to comment, but unless there are objections then I'll probably remove them in the future as part of the quickbar-ectomy that is in progress. -- (WT-en) Ryan 09:21, 1 July 2006 (EDT)

Including maps

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Should we include maps in the country quick bars? I'd suggest under the "location" map. - (WT-en) Andrew Haggard (Sapphire) 15:53, 13 June 2006 (EDT)

The two concerns I'd have would be 1) the map would be very tiny, and 2) the quickbar is getting a bit crowded. Looking at Italy as an example, I kind of like the way it's laid out now. That said, I'm terrible with aesthetics, so other opinions should carry a bit more weight than mine. -- (WT-en) Ryan 16:37, 13 June 2006 (EDT)
I've been thinking that we really should appropriate more of those location maps, probably for every country. They're Free and they're useful. I don't think they look bad in the quickbar... if any graphic element is going to go, I'd be inclined to (re)move the flags (provided there's a nice photo in place). - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 17:14, 13 June 2006 (EDT)
Just in case I've bungled my words again, I'm very much in favor of the location maps in the quickbar, I just don't think we should also put the full country map in the quickbar. Italy is a great example of how the location map can be useful even in a small form.
I looked into getting more of those maps from Wikipedia, but many have been licensed as GFDL only. I've left a note on WikiPedia:User talk:Vardion#CC-SA licensing for maps? asking if he will re-license CC-SA, but he seems to be traveling and so it may be a while before we get a response. -- (WT-en) Ryan 17:31, 13 June 2006 (EDT)
I like the location maps too and I like the flags also so I don't think anything should go. Regarding the licensing the location maps. Some of them are available as PD. In theory we can use one that's licensed as public domain then edit the images to suit our needs, right? - (WT-en) Andrew Haggard (Sapphire) 17:35, 13 June 2006 (EDT)
  • I have a map include on a quick bar for Russia. You can see it on my (WT-en) sandbox test page. Thoughts? I also have the code prepared to replace the Templat:Quickbar ready, but I'm not going to mess with that yet. The map is a bit smaller than it would be if we left it free standing in an article, but I'd rather include it in the quick bar, because I think it cleans up the look of articles. (WT-en) Andrew Haggard (Sapphire) 17:26, 13 June 2006 (EDT)

Order of image/flag/location map

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After adding a location map to Zambia the quickbar looked a bit odd to me - there was a nice landscape image of elephants, followed by a dinky flag image, followed by a nice location map. Switching the flag so that it is immediately above the "Quick Facts" section looks better to me, but others may disagree. Thoughts (if any)? -- (WT-en) Ryan 15:12, 27 June 2006 (EDT)

I like the way you ordered it. Image/Location/Map/Facts. - (WT-en) Andrew Haggard (Sapphire) 16:00, 27 June 2006 (EDT)

Image padding

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Another minor change, but I'm leaving a note here since quickbars are now used on a lot of pages. The "location" map image had 2px padding around it, but the "image" image had 0px padding. I've added 2px of padding to the "image" image as well, which looks better to me - see Singapore or United States of America. As always, I'm terrible with aesthetics, so if anyone feels strongly that the image looks better without padding feel free to revert. -- (WT-en) Ryan 19:26, 29 June 2006 (EDT)

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Any objection to updating this template so that the timezone header, electricty header, and the callingcode header link to Time zones, Electrical systems and List of country calling codes, respectively? I'm personally not very familiar with "UTC", and the voltage thing for electricity can be a bit confusing, so the additional links might be helpful for people. -- (WT-en) Ryan 10:13, 1 July 2006 (EDT)

No objection; it's certainly harmless. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 10:24, 1 July 2006 (EDT)
Done. The Singapore quickbar looked a bit odd to me after making the change, so I've also modified the template to prevent headings from wrapping ("Calling Code" was appearing on two lines). -- (WT-en) Ryan 10:32, 1 July 2006 (EDT)

Requests for Quickbar-ectomies

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Moved from the Pub:

The recently introduced quickbar template is now in use in over a hundred articles, but there are still a substantial number of articles using the old quickbar. Converting to the new format is pretty easy, so anyone interested in helping out can use this link to locate pages still implementing an HTML quickbar, and then edit the page to use the following syntax:

{{quickbar| image=[[Image:image|noframe|250px]]
| flag=[[Image:flag]]
| location=[[Image:location|noframe|250px]]
| capital=[[Capital]]
| government=Type of government
| currency=Currency used
| area=Country area
| population=Population
| language=[[Language1]], [[Language2]], Language3, ...
| religion=Religion(s)
| electricity=Electrical voltage and current
| callingcode=Calling code
| tld=Internet top level domain
| timezone=Time zone(s) in relation to UTC
}}

If you don't feel like looking up a field it can be left empty, such as "timezone=". In addition, (WT-en) Todd points out the following:

It's not terribly difficult; I've done dozens of them already. The most time-consuming part of it is looking up the usually-missing bits (which are all optional, but as long as you're there you might as well), and picking a pretty picture if you're so inclined. Here are some handy references: TLDs [1], electricity [2], calling codes, and time zones. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 13:58, 7 June 2006 (EDT)

This isn't a critical task, but the more people who feel like helping out the faster it will get done. -- (WT-en) Ryan 22:22, 13 June 2006 (EDT)

And it looks like, after a few weeks of mostly Ryan and me tag-teaming it, we've finished! At this point, it is theoretically possible to move, reformat, etc. all of the country/territory quickbars at once by editing a handful of templates. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 22:02, 2 July 2006 (EDT)

Quickbars on states?

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Moved from the Pub:

I've noticed whilst trawling through Wikivoyage upgrading the old quickbars to the new template that alot of the states in the US and also a few of the departements in France have quickbars... Do these actually need quickbars? In most cases, the info in the bar is merely a summary of what is already written in the wordy bit of the article or a copy of what is written in the country's quickbar, such as language spoken, currency, internet domain, time zone etc. A few examples of this are Maine, Poitou-Charentes. For the sake of uniformity throughout wikivoyage, I believe we should either

  • quickbar all such states/departements/provinces with a tailor made region quickbar template

OR

  • remove quickbars from states/departements/provinces.

However, in my opinion if we put region quickbars in, the kinds of things that could be put in - such as main sights - would require explanations in the See / Do sections.... What do other people think? (WT-en) Tsandell 07:54, 26 June 2006 (EDT)

Those quickbars don't appeal to me. The timezone info is nice to have. (WT-en) OldPine 09:44, 26 June 2006 (EDT)
See Template talk:Quickbar#Quickbar for States. -- (WT-en) Ryan 10:27, 26 June 2006 (EDT)

Quickbar for Cities

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We are using a quickbar for cities on de: for some months now and I think it might be good to introduce it in other language versions, too. Have a look at Paris, Dresden or Ko Tao to get an impression what it looks like. I also made a auto-translation-template so it is possible to copy-and-paste the quickbar from other language versions, that might be especially interesting for smaller versions. --(WT-en) Flip666 writeme! • 19:26, 14 May 2007 (EDT)

It does look nice, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort, considering the limited amount of travel-related information there is for a quickbar to present at the city level. Also, once we start putting it on some cities, we either need to determine which cities to use it on, or we put it on all cities... and creating a location map for every city in the guide... I feel tired just thinking about it. :) - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 21:21, 14 May 2007 (EDT)
Actually, the location maps are auto-generated so there's no need to create a location map for every single city, just add the country code and geo coordinates. -- (WT-en) Sapphire(Talk) • 21:26, 14 May 2007 (EDT)
Even so, looking up the coords of every city and applying the template to each article takes time. Then multiply that by several thousand. I know first-hand that applying a quickbar "only" to the countries in en: was a lot of work; adding one to cities will require geometrically more time than that, and every hour spent that way would be an hour not spent on other tasks. I'm not opposed to it, but I don't see it as the most useful way to spend our time. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 21:47, 14 May 2007 (EDT)
We should find out the coordinates for the geo-Template anyway. And it is easy: Click on the link to WikiPedia and then on the coordinates (E.g. Munich: [3]). You'll see a page where you can copy&paste them in the right format. And the advantage is once one language version has gathered all information (coodinated, area, population, etc.) all other language versions could just copy&paste the template. --(WT-en) Flip666 writeme! • 22:02, 14 May 2007 (EDT)
I really like this idea. Some information that might be valuable on the city level includes: telephone area code, zip/postal code, and time zone. For example I'm writing an article about Sandpoint Idaho right now and I want to find a quick way to let travellers know that Sandpoint is, unlike most of Idaho, on Pacific Time. I think a quickbar for cities might be a good idea for listing important tidbits so that a traveller doesn't have to dig through the article to find them. (WT-en) L'Aquatique 18:13, 30 July 2007 (EDT)
Oh please, please no!, I'd like to get rid of this template entirely, not expand its use. I really think that the "Contact" section of cities is the appropriate place for this kind of information; if it is something exceptionally important to the traveler, as in this case, I think a short note plus an in-article link should do the trick just fine. --(WT-en) Peter Talk 19:54, 30 July 2007 (EDT)
I'm afraid I don't understand why quickbars are so unpopular here? I checked out Flip's german links and I have to say it looks good. Some changes in content might be helpful, but having that information right up front saves time, ouais? (WT-en) L'Aquatique 23:17, 31 July 2007 (EDT)

Phil and I kicked ass on these templates. Everything is completely optional... Don't want to have a location map? No problem! The map requires to values of information before it's implemented - Geographic coordinates and map code. The QuickbarStadt has kind of grown on me because we include information that's not really typical of a travel guide, but can be interesting and necessary, such as emergency contact numbers for police, fire department, and EMS. We also have the altitude information, which can be very useful for people who have breathing problems. -- (WT-en) Sapphire(Talk) • 23:46, 31 July 2007 (EDT)

I feel like they take up too much space, with not that much gain. I think the single opening picture looks nicer than a quickbar, the location map is very well-made but I don't think all that necessary (I'd rather see good country and region maps with the cities and roads on them instead), geo coords and websites already have a space on the page, postal codes and area codes can easily go in contact... don't get me wrong, I totally appreciate the work you guys put into them... but I just don't think they add anything to city pages that is currently lacking. – (WT-en) cacahuate talk 00:03, 1 August 2007 (EDT)

Code Function Question

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Swept in from the pub:

Hi all, I've been poking around in the help trying to find a guide for some of the functions I've seen in the code but I can't seem to find it. I'm mainly concerned with the "quickbar" function. I'm trying to appropriately apply it to the Nashville page, but I cannot find a list of the available "subheadings".

For example, in the Singapore article there are a great many items in the quickbar, but I want to know all of the ones that the system will recognize...is there any place in the help for this?

The code looks something like this:

{{quickbar
| image=[[Image:Singapore CBD Dusk.JPG|noframe|250px]]
| flag=[[Image:sn-flag.png]]
| location=[[Image:LocationSingapore.png]]
}}

I want to know all of the listings like "image", "flag", "location", etc. Maybe I just haven't found it yet...

That being said, is there a listing of other functions (in addition to "quickbar") that the code will recognize?

Thanks! --(WT-en) Matt Talk 02:20, 10 August 2008 (EDT)

The quickbar only used for country articles. We do not use it for cities. It is a template and if you still want to know how it works, look at Template:Quickbar --(WT-en) Nick 02:40, 10 August 2008 (EDT)
Good to know, thanks. I didn't know. I will remove it. --(WT-en) Matt Talk 11:40, 10 August 2008 (EDT)

Delete the Quickbar

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The quickbar has always looked like a weird, mostly irrelevant Wikipedia import to me and I think it is wreaking havoc on the country article displays. Especially since the ToC now lies to the left of content at the top of the page, having a right-aligned quickbar takes up lots of space and squashes the actual content into a mess. On country articles that have color-coded region maps (and I personally think they all should), the quickbar forces the map way down below the regions section. I resolved this on the Russia page, but throwing html brs around is not a good fix and leaves a lot of new white space.

But above all, these "factoids" are mostly of dubious importance to the traveler (flag images? Internet TLD? Government type="Federation"? Area in square km?). And the factoids that are of any relevance should be covered in the main sections of the article anyway. They are not so important (e.g., time zones, currency, religions, population) that they should take up such valuable real estate at the top of the page, and thereby mess up our article formatting. Even the "location" map should simply be replaced (IMO) with a Wikivoyage style country map; and that doesn't have to be at the top of the page.

So, sorry if this seems radical, and I realize that a lot of effort has been put into this template, but I propose we delete the quickbar and discourage its use in country articles. --(WT-en) Peterfitzgerald Talk 21:20, 29 May 2007 (EDT)

I'd also like to point out that the quickbar is even messing up the formatting of this talk page. --(WT-en) Peterfitzgerald Talk 21:25, 29 May 2007 (EDT)
How about we first see if we can fix these problems before throwing out the baby, bathwater, and basin? I think some of that information is very useful (especially the location maps) and belongs at or near the top of the article, and the glamour photo in that position is a Wikivoyageism I'd hate to see lost. The reason the quickbars were done as templates was to make them easily changed, globally. So alterations can be made to the contents, format, and even position (to the extent that attached CSS will let us). Other options to avoid a conflict (e.g. moving the Cities or Understand section into the space beteen the TOC and Quickbar) should be considered as well. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 21:47, 29 May 2007 (EDT)
Just so we're clear, I'm proposing we ditch quickbars altogether, not just the template ;) It just seems to me that they're not necessary. We can keep the top photo right where it is just by using wiki writeup, ditto for the location maps (which I'd prefer to see replaced by Wikivoyage maps anyway), and everything else belongs in the article IMO. I'm curious to hear more thoughts, though. --(WT-en) Peterfitzgerald Talk 21:53, 29 May 2007 (EDT)
I'm with Todd on this one - let's first try some fixes for the TOC and other elements. I'm fairly confident that with a little bit of effort we can get things looking nice again, and I like how the quickbars provide a way to quickly identify country articles while also providing some succinct info for travelers. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 21:55, 29 May 2007 (EDT)

Well, it's not looking like there is much support for my deletion proposal, so I will scale back. I say remove the following pieces of unimportant trivia from the quickbar and allow them to simply reside within the appropriate sections of a country article:

  • Flag — maybe other editors think it "looks nice," but it is totally irrelevant from a travel perspective
  • Government type — comparative government structure = encyclopedic content which is totally uninformative for a traveler's purposes; moreover, one-liner government descriptions are uselessly simplistic and silly
  • Area — why on earth would a traveler need to know the square kilometers of a country?
  • Language — we have an entire section of the travel guide ("Talk") devoted to this, why duplicate it here?
  • Internet TLD — a totally irrelevant factoid that belongs in an encyclopedia, not featured so prominently in our travel guides

Removing these sections would make the quickbar a bit less of an eyesore IMO and would help relieve the formatting pressures that the quickbar is putting on our country articles (e.g., Azerbaijan). It would also just make the quickbar more useful by sorting out the relevant information (e.g., calling code & electricity) from the absurdly irrelevant (area) and the simplistic and non-useful (government type). --(WT-en) Peterfitzgerald Talk 16:02, 2 June 2007 (EDT)

I don't think the area is "absurdly irrelevant"; it provides a sense of scale that's not otherwise obvious from just a map. I do think that the land area vs. water area data is of little value, which is why I've generally condensed that item to just the land area. I'm not overly attached to the other items you suggest removing. My earlier point about the template is that we can experiment and even implement the necessary changes (even going with your proposal of just a photo and a location map) using the template, without editing any of the articles. We decide we don't want to include TLD, and it's gone; we decide we want it back, and it's back. Etc. And I'll also be frank: the "problem" here isn't just the quickbar, but also the new regionlist template that apparently was constructed without checking to see whether it would actually work in the space available; it hardly seems fair to blame the quickbar for that. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 16:25, 2 June 2007 (EDT)
It may be that square km are just absurdly irrelevant to (WT-en) this traveler because I don't have any relative measurements on hand to compare. I prefer size comparisons with other well known countries or states and have tried to provide those, when relevant, in understand sections. And I don't think that the regionlist template has much anything to do with this problem besides making it obvious. The problem is that the long quickbar forces right aligned content (usually images) way down and this prevents editors from doing sensible things like putting a regions map next to the regions section. I'm still quite skeptical of the quickbar's value altogether, but would anyone object if I go ahead and remove the flag, government type, language, and Internet TLD sections as per my previous comment? That would at least reduce the problem a bit. --(WT-en) Peterfitzgerald Talk 16:55, 6 June 2007 (EDT)
I've got no objection to removing the TLD field, but language is useful, government is helpful, and flag has been there long enough that I've gotten kind of attached to it. If others want those fields removed I've got no real objection, but without comment from others I don't think too many changes should be made yet. Perhaps solicit further comment in the Pub? -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 19:57, 6 June 2007 (EDT)
I would object to removing any of the fields, except maybe the water/total areas. (WT-en) Jpatokal 22:40, 6 June 2007 (EDT)

Round two

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Well I'm jumping in way late on this convo, but I actually came to propose something similar but less drastic than Peter... I also find a few sections could use ditching. TLD, government and area.... those are all far more relevant to Wikipedia than us... I used to just ignore them as something that doesn't really hurt to have, but I more and more agree with Peter, that's such valuable real estate up there, we could easily chop 5 lines off of it without losing any substance. I do like most of the other fields however. Jani would you reconsider? and are there any other objectors? – (WT-en) cacahuate talk 23:12, 5 July 2008 (EDT)

No, I would not reconsider. They're all basic data and there's no other sensible place to put them. (WT-en) Jpatokal 13:30, 6 July 2008 (EDT)
My position hasn't changed at all on this one—I still think the whole thing is both unnecessary and harmful. And I've yet to see any logical argument for why it should stay that rises above the purely assertoric. I think that only a few of these fields would qualify as "basic data" about countries (and even fewer would qualify as travel relevant basic data). And I'm bewildered by the notion that you'd think there's no other sensible place to put them. Here's my take on each element:
Image field — No need to do away with lead images, obviously, but there are benefits to using them sans quickbar: outside of a quickbar, one has more leeway to adjust the size of the lead image to accommodate different vertical/horizontal ratios.
Flag — I really don't see what the flag's relevance for travel is. Flags strike me as trivia, for which interested parties should consult an encyclopedia (or just a basic google image search), rather than a travel guide. Moreover, we delete state/provincial/municipal flags when people upload them as a matter of course—they do not serve the purpose of illustrating our guides and are about as travel-irrelevant as anything. If there is some pressing reason to keep national flags in our guides, we could anyway simply use thumbnails, which are way more flexible than a giant template.
Location — this is another Wikipedia import, that just doesn't strike me as that useful. I can see why someone might disagree, but again, it would be more flexible for page formatting purposes to use thumbnails rather than the template. I'd rather see these go altogether since I think they dampen enthusiasm for actually creating Wikivoyage style region maps for each country, which would achieve the same purpose while also showing linked destinations & routes between them.
Capital — this field duplicates information that belongs (and almost always already is) in both the understand section and at the top of the cities list. The cities list part is hard policy.
Government — disclosure: I'm a political scientist. I cringe, and a little vomit appears in the back of my mouth, each time I look at this field for just about every country in the world. Trying create two-word descriptions for "government type" is a dead-end, stupidly reductionist, useless, and utterly travel-irrelevant exercise.
Here's one of my favorite disasters: Iran = theocratic republic. What the hell is that supposed to mean?! Firstly, Iran's republic is not theocratic, it is democratic in so far as people may vote for the republic's leadership, and corrupt & manipulated in that the electoral possibilities are vetted by an appointed council. But to call the government of Iran a republic is ludicrous — that's just one wing of a very convoluted governing system. Decisions taken by the republican executive, before its cabinet can implement them, are subject to veto by the Council of Guardians, and vetoes can then be appealed to the Expediating Council (selected by the Assembly of Experts); Expediating Council decisions can be overturned by the Supreme Leader. Both of these councils are unelected and are appointed by the Supreme Leader, who has always been a powerful Shiite ayatollah (but not necessarily the most powerful nor the most respected ayatollah in Iran!). The military is not under control of the republican leadership, it falls under direct control of the Council of Guardians. The Iranian Military is also not the only national militia, there are also the Revolutionary Guard, under The Judiciary leadership is hand picked by the Supreme Leader, which in turn selects lower level leadership. New Supreme Leaders are picked for life by the Assembly of Experts, which is elected democratically from a restricted pool of scholars on Islamic Jurisprudence (vetted by the Council of Guardians). I'm just scratching the surface of the Iranian government, though (and I'm not sure whether any of this rises above the level of interesting factoids to an actual traveler in the country) — much of the real power in Iran is wielded through leadership of the quasi-government corporatist foundations that regulate virtually all economic matters. And as for all the vetting, and for getting policies through the unelected branches (or even the elected ones) there's a complex web of feudal-style political marriages underwriting who gets where with whom.
Now that sort of info could go into an understand section (although I'm not sure we want so much detail on political systems, since most of it is just irrelevant for travel). If we want to develop an intelligent way of quickly dissecting government type as it is relevant for travelers, we could create a standard table for countries showing categories with numerical values for things like customs efficiency, police corruption, ease of obtaining visas, respect for human rights, and we could get ordinal scores for those from sophisticated sources outside this website. (They'd need to be updated yearly, though.) But the "government type" blather is an embarrassment; certainly not "basic data" with "nowhere else to go."
Currency — This info is duplicated under a dedicated Money section under Buy.
Area — As I argued above, displaying a raw number is not a good way to convey size. It's far more useful to compare its area to a better known quantity (e.g., Côte d'Ivoire is a large West African country, slightly bigger than Germany). If people are looking for quick data (trivia) about a country, they should look at an encyclopedia, not a travel guide. If someone feels like adding the numerical area of the country to an article, they can easily do it in the introductory paragraph or the understand section, but I see no real use for it anyway.
Population — ditto as for Area.
Language — rather than hoarding long lists of spoken languages at the top of the page, this information belongs (and is duplicated) in the Talk section.
Religion — this is another gross example of reductionism (data on religious affiliation means wildly different things across different countries with different cultural understandings of what it means to affiliate with a certain religion), and anyway belongs in the Understand section.
Electricity — this is the only field for which I find the quickbar useful. We don't have a great place to put it. Where do we discuss which kind of power adapter to bring, anyway?
Callingcode — info duplicated in the Contact section.
TLD — I fully realize that it may just be my ignorance, but I have no idea what purpose this info could possibly serve for a traveler. Although removing tld has been brought up numerous times on this page, no one's advanced any arguments for a) why this information is at all relevant to our goals, and b) why it must occupy space at the forefront of all country articles.
Time zone — belongs in Contact section.
There's a clear rationale to get rid of the quickbar altogether, that is, it takes up a ton of space at the top of articles disproportionate to the relatively low value it provides. Reducing it should be a no-brainer. Where am I wrong? What rationale exists behind these objections? --(WT-en) Peter Talk 16:28, 6 July 2008 (EDT)

Ah snap! Quickbar just got his aaaassssss smacked. Just to be clear, I only want to reduce, I like most of the info-at-a-glance. To me, the no-brainers are the 3 I mentioned before and I'll even throw in flag now. Sooooo... I'd like to propose ditching these:

  • Area – agree with Peter's argument... I'd like to delete all together, but failing that, reduce to just total
  • Government – Peter says it well... I'd argue that we delete it even on far less grounds—that it's encyclopedic, not usually travel-relevant, and can be dealt with in Understand if of particular interest.
  • TLD – the most irrelevant of all... when would you ever have to reference this? It's not a calling code. If a business uses their country-specific one, then it will be in their website address, you don't head up to the quickbar to see which TLD to add after the address. This one's a total no-brainer.
  • Flag – Takes up space, gives nothing to the traveler, it just looks nice and official. I say ditch it, but I won't shout too loudly about that one.

Peter I have other comments for keeping some of the other sections, though you bring good arguments... I'll save that convo for later though if needed, I'd like if we can at least come to a consensus to reduce this a bit, and not get bogged down with the whole enchilada. So can we ditch those 4 sections people? – (WT-en) cacahuate talk 02:25, 7 July 2008 (EDT)

Bump!!! Anyone else care to comment about this, or can I ditch these 4? Also, I just reduced the size of text to 85%, any objections? – (WT-en) cacahuate talk 23:17, 30 November 2008 (EST)
I wouldn't mind seeing TLD go away, but I think government is useful - there's clearly use for travel in knowing if a country is a democracy or a military dictatorship. The flag is a helpful way of visually differentiating country articles (useful for smaller countries) and area doesn't hurt to keep around. Religion would actually be my choice to remove ahead of any of these other three... Is the goal just to shrink the length of the quickbar? Does your font size change fix the problem, or are there other things we could do to change the display without losing data? -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 23:25, 30 November 2008 (EST)
Of those four, I'd only keep the flag. As Peter pointed out, the other things are typically already covered, and can be covered in much more accurate detail, in the Understand section. (WT-en) Texugo 23:31, 30 November 2008 (EST)

I still think that the quickbar should stay. Of course it's possible to cover all the information elsewhere, but the whole point of the quickbar that it's quick: one glance and I know if I'm dealing with a supercrowded modern city state (Parliamentary republic, 707.1 sq km, pop. 4,588,600) or an empty speck in the middle of nowhere (Territory of New Zealand, 10 sq.km., pop. 1,431), what they speak and what kind of plugs I should bring along.

But I'll throw out a new idea: how about a collapsible box? (WT-en) Jpatokal 01:35, 1 December 2008 (EST)

I like the idea of a collapsible box, could someone make up a suggestion template somewhere? as for...

  • TLD I actually think it's useful.
  • I'd also really hate to see the flag go.
  • Government I can accept being removed, as the North Korea example shows we are on rocking ground with this one.
  • Area hmm I don't really care.

That's just my two cents --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) Talk 18:49, 1 December 2008 (EST)

I don't really mind the flag so much either... the font size helped I think some... but I still think TLD is utterly useless, and would rather see area and gov't covered in understand. Collapsible it an interesting idea too – (WT-en) cacahuate talk 20:28, 1 December 2008 (EST)

I agree the quickbar takes up too much space at the top of country articles. I would like to see extraneous information excised and the remainder moved to a box at the top of the Understand section. The photo and possibly the locator map should remain at the top, of course. (WT-en) LtPowers 14:55, 7 January 2009 (EST)

Round three

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I somehow only just noticed LtPowers' suggestion to move the quickbar to the understand section, after slimming it down. I like the idea! I would suggest moving it off the top of the page, and removing the following (since I think there is something approaching a consensus that these at least should go):

  • Flag
  • Government
  • TLD

We could then move the image out of the template and to the lede, and perhaps move the locator map underneath it. (I tend to think a good regions map does the locator map's job better, though, and is a WT standard instead of a WP import.) --(WT-en) Peter Talk 17:47, 22 February 2011 (EST)

TLD is extremely unnecessary as it's always given with the address already and you don't need to memorise it in any way (as discussed before), so I think it should go. Government type may or may not stay, I don't really have a preference on that (but if it's removed from the quickbar, at least a short mention of that within the text of "understand" would be nice). Locator maps can be totally eliminated, as they are too small and simplistic to be of any use unless you have an idea about where the country more or less lies on earth in the first place. However, one of the things I really liked when I first came across with this site was the small flag followed by a representative picture at country articles. I'm not sure how this setup could be kept if the quickbox gets moved to "understand" (as the lead photo should then be left behind at its place at the top), but I'd really like the flags not be removed somehow. I don't have a reasonable justification for that, other than "I just like it that way", though. – (WT-en) Vidimian 18:38, 22 February 2011 (EST)
The flag could remain as the "header photo" for a quickbar relocated to understand. I don't have a particular aversion to flags—just flags eating up the most valuable real estate on the page. --(WT-en) Peter Talk 19:21, 22 February 2011 (EST)
I also like having the flag, but the government can go. Most of the time they are meaningless and they're highly subjective, depending on what relations an individual's country has with that government/country. Real government situations are better outlined in the Understand section. I also agree that TLD can go. I do have a question, though: Is this meant to allow us to move the Understand section down below the regions/cities? As it is now, the bar is practically already in the Understand section, since it is at the top. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 22:55, 22 February 2011 (EST)
Yes, it is to allow the understand section to be moved down so readers less familiar with our site don't miss our all-important geographical hierarchical navigation system (which certainly has been a problem in the past—there was even an article written on the web complaining about a huge city article, which "doesn't list attractions and restaurants, which led to the use of Template:PrintDistricts). It also would be useful just to prevent text from being so squished between the ToC and quickbar (a real issue on smaller screens, or for people with visual impairments that require larger text. --(WT-en) Peter Talk 11:06, 23 February 2011 (EST)
Hey, after rereading my comment for the first time in two years, I agree it sounds like an awesome idea. I just wish I was better at web design so I could craft a pleasing template to go with the idea. (WT-en) LtPowers 12:13, 23 February 2011 (EST)

Here's a mockup, using Mexico: Template talk:Quickbar/working -- What do you think? (WT-en) LtPowers 14:45, 1 August 2011 (EDT)

Wow, that's a huge improvement. Great work. I might consider adding the languages to the list as they are important to travelling, even though they are already covered in the Talk section. --(WT-en) globe-trotter 18:32, 1 August 2011 (EDT)
In many countries, it's impossible to distill the languages down to any sort of brief description. Take Pakistan, for instance: if you look at the quickbar, it appears that Punjabi is the most widely spoken language, with Urdu and English restricted to official uses... but if you read the Talk section, it becomes clearer that Urdu actually is the lingua franca and the one language widely understood throughout the country. (WT-en) LtPowers 19:54, 1 August 2011 (EDT)
Is there any particular reason that calling code was dropped? Additionally, the flag layout seems a bit awkward and might be better handled in its own row or as a smaller thumbnail with more padding. Otherwise, if there's a broad consensus to shrink the quickbar (I'm personally somewhat ambivalent) then this seems like a solid proposal. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 21:18, 1 August 2011 (EDT)
I actually think the flag looks pretty good there. --(WT-en) globe-trotter 22:03, 1 August 2011 (EDT)
I would be absolutely thrilled with this change. I'll support Ryan's call to keep the calling code—that's pretty much the only thing I ever used the quickbars for as a reader. --(WT-en) Peter Talk 23:35, 1 August 2011 (EDT)
I support it too, to include the calling code. (WT-en) texugo 02:11, 2 August 2011 (EDT)
I added the calling code back in. I don't know why we'd want to put the flag on its own line when we're trying to conserve space. (WT-en) LtPowers 10:52, 2 August 2011 (EDT)
Are there any objections to implementing the new quick bar? --(WT-en) globe-trotter 15:20, 10 August 2011 (EDT)
I've templatized my mockup at Template:Quickbar/working. If anyone knows of any unusual cases (like Nepal, with it's non-standard flag), please give the template a try on a test page somewhere and let me know how it works. (WT-en) LtPowers 21:29, 16 August 2011 (EDT)
The flag still looks slightly odd to my eyes... what about the following minor change:
Current Proposed
Mexico noframe
noframe
Capital Mexico City (Distrito Federal)
Currency Mexican peso (MXN)
Mexico noframe
noframe
Capital Mexico City (Distrito Federal)
Currency Mexican peso (MXN)
That takes up slightly less space, and the flag doesn't look quite as squeezed in. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 01:47, 19 August 2011 (EDT)
I don't think the flag looks squeezed in at all; rather, it's being used as a UI element in itself, like an icon on a GUI window or even (if you'll pardon the comparison) a corner field on a flag. Making it smaller and moving it away from the border makes it appear as if it was just pasted on rather than being part of the design. (WT-en) LtPowers 10:14, 19 August 2011 (EDT)
Agree with LtPowers that his version looks somewhat better. I do think it looks cleaner without the flag, but on the other hand I do think a flag should be included. --(WT-en) globe-trotter 16:55, 23 August 2011 (EDT)
I'm very happy with the revised template, and slightly prefer Ryan's version only because it is a little smaller. Is there any reason we shouldn't introduce this now? It would be good to start moving the understand sections back below the regions, cities, and ODs, as is standard everywhere else. That would be a task well combined with what would be a great CotM. --(WT-en) Peter Talk 17:44, 23 August 2011 (EDT)

The first step is to decide what to call the new template; then we can start replacing it on a country-by-country basis, while switching the Regions and Understand sections at the same time. (WT-en) LtPowers 10:03, 1 September 2011 (EDT)

From a pure graphic design POV, the positioning of the flag on the left hand example looks far better. There should not be unequal top, bottom and right margins. That's why the right hand example looks like a cut and paste rather than a design.--(WT-en) burmesedays 10:18, 1 September 2011 (EDT)
Do we really need to do this by hand? Why not simply make the changes to this template? --(WT-en) Peter Talk 22:38, 1 September 2011 (EDT)
I also prefer the design on the left above, for the same reason that (WT-en) Burmesedays stated above. (WT-en) texugo 00:53, 2 September 2011 (EDT)
The image inclusion syntax changed (necessary to allow the title bar to adjust to different-width flags), so the flag and location images wouldn't show up until that syntax was fixed. It would also hide the lead image on every country page until fixed, since the new template doesn't include a photo parameter. (WT-en) LtPowers 09:44, 2 September 2011 (EDT)

We have now included the quickbar under Understand at Russia, Thailand and Netherlands. I'm not really sure if I like it -- it doesn't really function as a quickbar anymore, as you have to scroll down to Understand to actually see it. --(WT-en) globe-trotter 10:44, 29 September 2011 (EDT)

Agreed - the point of the bar is to provide a "quick" overview and a visual indicator of the article type. It should be at the top of the page. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 11:15, 29 September 2011 (EDT)
What exactly is in the quickbar that's so important to know that you can't scroll down to "Understand"? (WT-en) LtPowers 11:26, 29 September 2011 (EDT)
I meant that the quickbar kind of loses its original purpose. "Understand" implies that the reader is willing to read more deeply about a country's history and culture, while the quickbar is just for a quick peek. If the reader is reading Understand anyway, he/she might as well just look under the Electricity header to find more information about that, instead of using the quickbar. --(WT-en) globe-trotter 11:49, 29 September 2011 (EDT)


It would be really nice if we could put it at the top left corner, which would negate some of its disruptive effects. That would require changing the way we display the ToC, though. This discussion (was hard to find) was an interesting one, and I really liked what that user was working on. Perhaps we can revisit what to do with this post-MediaWiki upgrade? --(WT-en) Peter Talk 14:20, 29 September 2011 (EDT)
I don't see how moving it to the top-left would help anything, though I fully support any and all efforts to get that dang TOC out of the way. (WT-en) LtPowers 17:10, 29 September 2011 (EDT)


Collapsing quickbars

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FYI, documentation on implementing collapsing frames is here on Wikipedia. Basically, it requires changes to Common.css and Common.js, both of which are admin-editable, so we can do it without IB involvement -- but it will increase the size of all WT pages by 5-10K. (Cached after being fetched the first time though, so probably not too big a problem.) Time to plunge forward and make it happen? (WT-en) Jpatokal 22:11, 7 January 2009 (EST)

RDF piggyback

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Since every country article should have a quickbar, and only country articles should have a quickbar, I've piggybacked some RDF code that says "this article describes a country" into the quickbar template.

At some point it might be interesting to make some of the quickbar fields RDF attributes of the country, too. --(WT-en) Evan 13:15, 11 June 2007 (EDT)

Have a look at #Quickbar for Cities, as well as the articles using the quickbar. There are currently a number of cities that include this template. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 13:40, 11 June 2007 (EDT)

Region and town templates

[edit]

I appreciate that we don't necessarily want infobox overload, but IMHO if well done they improve the professional appearance of articles and enable key facts to be displayed neatly and clearly instead of padding out the text. In particular, could we consider infoboxes for:

I may be able to create the infoboxes based on the de.wikivoyage ones. --(WT-en) SaxonWarrior 02:16, 10 May 2011 (EDT)

The trouble with infoboxes (or quickbars, as we call them here, since "infoboxes" are something else) is that they encourage the inclusion of non-travel-relevant information. Even our country quickbars are bloated with basically decorative information. They also don't lend themselves well to nuance, which can be much more usefully described in prose. (WT-en) LtPowers 08:57, 10 May 2011 (EDT)

I get that. So let's restrict the information displayed. For example, the Lower Saxony state article on de.wikivoyage (de:Niedersachsen) only has the following info:

  • Photo (which occupies the normal place of an image in the header)
  • Location map - showing where the state is in the country
  • The state flag
  • Capital city
  • Status i.e. "federal state within the Federal Republic of Germany"
  • Area
  • Population

This is less than we have at country level, which also includes: language, currency, calling code, internet and time zone, none of which are needed (unless it's a large country where time zones vary). --(WT-en) SaxonWarrior 13:38, 10 May 2011 (EDT)

I would be in support of adding something that more clearly identifies top-level regions such as states, but ideally it would be something less intrusive than the quickbars used for country articles. I don't think that flag is particularly necessary, but a location map, capital, and perhaps a quicklink to the "Cities" section would be helpful. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 13:57, 10 May 2011 (EDT)
I will work up a template for consideration if that's acceptable. BTW do we use sandboxes here? --(WT-en) SaxonWarrior 09:31, 12 May 2011 (EDT)
Under the auspices of the Region maps expedition, I have started an awful lot of region articles, and it had crossed my mind before that a tailored quickbar would be helpful. I look forward to seeing what you come up with. And yes on sandboxes - see: http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Graffiti_wall --(WT-en) Burmesedays 11:00, 16 May 2011 (EDT)
For regions: we don't need a bespoke infobox because we can just use the Template:Quickbar for countries and leave out any irrelevant parameters - see Lower Saxony for an example.
For cities and towns: as a trial I have created Template:QuickbarPlace - see it in use at Cologne. I don't particularly like the location map (too large, no detail and yuk colour) - see the template example - but that is a function of other templates, not this one. I'd also like to make the data column wider at the expense of the parameter column, but don't know how. I think most of the info is about right. If you want to visit a city or town it's a good idea to have a feel for its size, location, visit the official and tourist office websites and, while you're there, have a streetmap, know what numbers to ring in an emergency, etc, and how people could phone or write (hence dial code and post code). --(WT-en) SaxonWarrior 04:55, 19 May 2011 (EDT)
I'm pretty sure that infoboxes for city articles are something that was decided against and eliminated long ago. I would ask you not to include it anymore articles for now. I have a feeling most of the community is going to come down against this one, starting with me. (WT-en) texugo 11:06, 19 May 2011 (EDT)
I would agree with Texugo that the usefulness of an infobox for a city seems limited. For the region, I think the map is useful, but the flag seems unnecessary to me, and overall I'd like to see the box be a bit smaller so that it's not taking up so much space. As noted above, I think location map, a quicklink to the "Cities" section, and capital would probably be sufficient. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 11:13, 19 May 2011 (EDT)
Truth be told, many people have found the quickbars unnecessary (or at least cluttered) even for countries. (WT-en) LtPowers 17:24, 19 May 2011 (EDT)

I think Template:QuickbarPlace looks great at Cologne and am wondering why folks think this is an undesirable move? A quick, organised reference for stats seems to me a lot less cumbersome than writing the same in long sentences. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 22:28, 19 May 2011 (EDT)

My disagreement boils down to two issues: I don't think the information presented in the quickbox for cities is particularly important for travel, and I like the idea that quickboxes are used relatively sparingly to provide a UI clue that an article is special - for example, current quickboxes provide a fast visual clue that you're viewing a country article. Regarding the first point, it's debatable how valuable the country-level quickbar info is, but I think it would be tough to make an argument that it isn't more important to know the government type, calling code, capital and currency of a country than it is to know the height above sea level of a city. I can possibly see some value if we used this box for top-level regions and huge cities as a way to quickly guide readers to the sub-region and district sections of the article via shortcut links, but I don't think it works well as part of the standard template for every city article on the site. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 22:43, 19 May 2011 (EDT)
Yeah, I'd say that it basically comes down to this:
  • Population, if relevant, can be easily mentioned in the lead in prose in an approximate way (as is already in Cologne in addition to the infobox). There is no need to have exact census figures.
  • Area is largely irrelevant because it's quite relative to how the given country divides up their space, and also it's ultimate meaning is dependent on population density as well. Seeing the area of a city doesn't help me get an idea of what to expect, and we usually deem it extraneous encyclopedic information, even when it gets added in prose form.
  • Height above sea level is irrelevant to the traveller except in cases of a certain few cities with exceptionally high elevation, where it can be mentioned in prose.
  • Local dialing codes are already included any place that we list phone numbers, and lists of dialing codes for any large city or metropolis are likely to be very long. Ultimately they are useless unless you already have a full phone number to dial, in which case you already have the exchange number as well.
  • Time zone is info that belongs to only the country or region article because it will be the same for the surrounding region or country, hence we don't need to list it in every city.
  • Official website already has its place in the opening line of the article, just after the first mention of the city name.
It really doesn't leave much use for an infobox at all. (WT-en) texugo 23:00, 19 May 2011 (EDT)
Hmmm. An assumption there that our region articles are of any practical use. They are of course mostly empty and remain the single most unloved things at Wikivoyage. The massive efforts made on a couple of specific regions have not had the desired effect of encouraging a wider effort. A region quickbar template would at least encourage some information appearing in those all those empty articles.
There is lots of information that we include in City articles (even in Stars) that in theory would be more appropriate in a Region or Country article - climate comes to mind immediately. The fact remains that the theory is largely ignored as nobody (with very few exceptions) does any work on region articles.
As an aside, I believe altitude is of interest to every intelligent traveler. For example, go anywhere in the tropics and see the effect of moving from sea level to even 500 metres - a very minor elevation change which will significantly effect temperature and humidity levels. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 01:18, 20 May 2011 (EDT)
Seeing the altitude alone doesn't help you predict anything, though. A wide variety of other factors influence climate as well. That's why we have the climate template. (WT-en) texugo 01:48, 20 May 2011 (EDT)
As a newcomer to Wikivoyage, I think a smart city infobox give an article a professional and attractive appearance that encourages the reader to read on. With the right information it can also provide a useful rapid orientation.
I have taken the format straight from German Wikivoyage, where, clearly they are very happy with it. However I think it needs improving in 2 ways: first, it should be reduced to the same size as the country infoboxes. Second, the maps (not a function of this template) need improving e.g. with a small country map as an inset and a region or state as the main map. I'd go for a less "in your face" colour too. Wikipedia has some good examples. I don't like the current map and would leave it out - see Bispingen
As for the info provided - that's a separate debate. I'd keep it relatively short: key facts only.
Finally, a newcomer comment: if we're too prescriptive about things that are relatively subjective (and this is one) we will put people off helping to improve and maintain Wikivoyage. That would be a shame.
I propose we allow the infobox to be kept, but focus on improving it. --(WT-en) SaxonWarrior 02:33, 20 May 2011 (EDT)
For what it's worth, as a collector of atlases when I was a kid and beyond, I like facts and figures about places. I'm not the only one, and those who aren't interested can easily skip over the info boxes. Clearly, I vote "Yes" on them, at least in principle. (WT-en) Ikan Kekek 02:43, 20 May 2011 (EDT)
PS I've reduced box width to 250px and font size to 85%. This matched the country infobox and looks better - see Bispingen - but note that if the map is included it widens the box to 300px for some reason. For now I'd leave the map out until we sort it. --(WT-en) SaxonWarrior 07:03, 20 May 2011 (EDT)
Box content is not a separate issue-- if there are only one or two things it's going to contain, then there is no need for a box to be crowding up the lead of every article in the first place. I like facts and figures too, but they belong in an encyclopedia, not here. Please remember that if we allow this template, then it's probably going to have to go into every city article. (The linked discussions below make some good points about the immense amount of work this would imply, with our tens of thousands of city articles.) And do we really need an infobox listing every zip code and dialing exchange in New York City?? (I have already demonstrated the uselessness of having dialing codes in the box anywhere, and we've already deemed zip codes to be so irrelevant that we don't even allow them in listings.)
This is not the first time this idea has come up-- see Template talk:Quickbar#Quickbar for cities, and while I didn't participate in the discussion then, I will add my voice to those that shot it down the first time. A number of people already want to chop down the country quickbox and or move it, or just eliminate it entirely and I count myself among those too. Quickbars squash the lead and give prime real estate to information that is basically a list of irrelevant curiosities.(WT-en) texugo 07:37, 20 May 2011 (EDT)
I take your points, Texugo. Your arguments are very convincing, in my opinion. I think I'd still argue somewhat to keep infoboxes at the nation-state level, but your point that if we allow them for some cities, they would be expected to be put in all of them tends to win me over in regard to cities, unless some other logical rationale for where the templates should and should not be included that makes some kind of logical distinction between cities can be advanced. (WT-en) Ikan Kekek 08:14, 20 May 2011 (EDT)
I don't find Texugo's arguments convincing at all. 1. No one's proposing an infobox with only "one or two things". 2. The lede has to be punchy and attractive, box or no box, so it'll be crowded with something either way. 3. No one's proposing adding a box to every article. 4. There's no immense amount of work - articles can be improved over time. That's the point of a wiki. I'd just like to use them for our region. 5. Re New York City: we can pick and choose what the box displays for any given city or omit the box entirely. 6. Surely you're not suggesting we can only discuss an idea once? 7. Clearly there are some for and some agin, and probably some in between. 8. No one's suggesting the box should contain irrelevant curiosities. I believe some articles look far more professional and attractive with a decent infobox, good photo and some crunchy facts alongside a short lede. Far more likely to attract travellers - which is surely the aim. --(WT-en) SaxonWarrior 13:39, 20 May 2011 (EDT)

I think it would be great to have quickbars for all region articles. As I see it, it would be helpful to readers to have an overview map showing where the region is located, and also giving a quick way to direct to subregions and cities in the region. In relation to cities, I am not convinced that it would be good to have it for every city, but for huge cities, I think it would be helpful to have such quickbars including an overview map of the location and quick links to city districts. I am not convinced by the arguments about information not being of interest to travelers, we should of course restrict the information to travel related facts, but I do not see why information about flag, height, area, population etc should not be relevant, it is certainly something I would be interest in for any region or city I visit. Besides, quickbars will make our articles look more uniform and professional, --(WT-en) ClausHansen 17:51, 20 May 2011 (EDT)

It sounds like there may not be consensus to include quickboxes for all city articles, but that there might be hesitant support for high-level region articles (there is some strong disagreement, but several people have expressed support as well). Would it make sense to try this out by (for now) removing the boxes from city articles but adding them to the articles for German states? That would allow people to tweak the implementation, discuss something concrete, and hopefully move this discussion towards some sort of resolution. I think Saxon's point that "if we're too prescriptive about things that are relatively subjective (and this is one) we will put people off helping to improve and maintain Wikivoyage" is a valid one, and sometimes there is too much resistance to change - that can be a good thing when it comes to keeping things consistent, but it also hinders progress and innovation, which is a danger for a site that relies on having a vibrant community. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 19:02, 20 May 2011 (EDT)
That sounds like a very sensible suggestion to me Ryan. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 22:16, 20 May 2011 (EDT)
That sounds really helpful. I also notice that Michelin guides have a different set of key facts in their "infoboxes" - which I guess is based on customer research. I'd like to trial that and see how it's received against a) no infobox and b) a cut-down version of what we have here. Could I therefore also propose as a trial that we be allowed to experiment with different city boxes for just a very limited area e.g. Lower Saxony. I can get some folks working on this, so we can have fresh minds and I may be able to do a "customer survey". We can then decide downstream which way to go. I think Wikivoyage is a brilliant concept and was intending to have my team get this area at "guide" standard by Christmas anyway and this could just be part of that work. --(WT-en) SaxonWarrior 22:49, 20 May 2011 (EDT)
Not saying that I will ultimately support its use, but I can agree to let you demo test a quickbar only on the 16 German state articles. A city quickbar is still totally and completely out of the question because, again-- yes, essentially you are proposing something that would have to go in every city article because, for the sake of consistency across the site, and for the sake of patrollability we need clear criteria. Even if we decide to allow a quickbar for only top-level regions/states, that is still going to mean many hundreds of quickbars that need to be created, which is indeed an "immense amount of work". Let me just go ahead and respond to your points above:
1. No one's proposing an infobox with only "one or two things".
No one has demonstrated the usefulness of more than one or two of the items either.
2. The lede has to be punchy and attractive, box or no box, so it'll be crowded with something either way.
I'm talking about squeezing the physical format of the text into a little column between the TOC and the infobox, which is one of the reasons some don't like the country quickbars we already have and have expressed interest in moving them down to the Understand section.
3. No one's proposing adding a box to every article.
That is exactly what you are proposing, by default. Unless you have some spiffy criteria for allowing contributors and patrollers to know when and when not to include them, then it's a free-for-all on several hundreds of top-level region article, or worse, tens of thousands of city article pages. Again, an enormous amount of work to bring the site back close to being consistent again. It's even worse than a site-wide article template change, because each quickbar would require some research to fill it out properly.
4. There's no immense amount of work - articles can be improved over time. That's the point of a wiki. I'd just like to use them for our region.
Yeah, see above.
5. Re New York City: we can pick and choose what the box displays for any given city or omit the box entirely.
No, no and no. That would open up a huge can of squabbles over what to display or not display here or there. Consistency benefits readers, contributors, and patrollers alike, and we've always strived for consistency across our articles. I don't expect us to stop now. Plus, you are never going to convince me of the utility of using prime real estate at the top of the page to tell me what area code is already included on every phone number on the page, no matter what the size of the city. Those codes by themselves are meaningless.
6. Surely you're not suggesting we can only discuss an idea once?
Of course not. But I do want to point out that the opinions expressed about the first attempt are equally valid now and must be addressed if we are to move forward.
7. Clearly there are some for and some agin, and probably some in between.
As Ryan said above, there is some tentative support, mostly from relatively new users, to try it out on top-level regions. And sure, some think the box looks nifty, but I'm not sure everyone has fully realized the implications here. This would be a massive site-wide transition that will take months. If people support the idea and talk about it in realistic terms, demonstrating its value to be worth months of quickbox research/insertion work, I will be much more willing to listen than if it's just "facts are neat-o, let's put 'em in".
8. No one's suggesting the box should contain irrelevant curiosities.
We appear to disagree on the relevancy of the items you have included. I have already stated why I think most of them are irrelevant and still wonder why you think it's useful to include dialing codes when they are already included in all listings, duplicate emergency numbers that are the same for every city in the country, duplicate the same time zone info for every city in the country, duplicate the website link when it's already at the top of the page, etc. As a sidenote, Wikivoyage has a strong bias against duplicating identical info in every article.
So yeah, go ahead and create a test for German states. Just don't expect this to be an easy fight to get the go-ahead for rampant quickbar proliferation. We need to demonstrate the real usefulness and desirability of it because it's a lot bigger policy change than you think it is.(WT-en) texugo 02:35, 21 May 2011 (EDT)


I am also sceptical about their usefulness below country articles. I wonder if the real problem is just that people are not looking at regional articles with content/maps. Looking at Chugoku, for example, I think the map is enough as is to showcase the region without an info box. Other information can easily be put in the text. Of course, I will wait to see how these German articles look and what content is placed there. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 03:27, 21 May 2011 (EDT)
I am not sure that the tentative support is from such relatively new or inexperienced users as stated. I have made about 20,000 edits here and I suspect that Claus would have a similar number to his name.
I look forward to seeing how the German top level region articles look with this template.
A key benefit here could be having region articles that actually contain some helpful content.--(WT-en) Burmesedays 05:05, 21 May 2011 (EDT)
I was referring to the other two users.(WT-en) texugo 06:24, 21 May 2011 (EDT)
@Texugo. I have no desire for a fight; I only wish to develop the outstanding potential of Wikivoyage for the benefit of others. I'd also like to understand better how changes are achieved here. Is there a consensus approach or a panel that approves changes? If so, what's the process? And does anyone check what customers want to see? Also does every article have to look the same? It seems a pity if the format is universal and fixed for ever with no room for variety or creativity? I apologise for my inexperience on Wikivoyage, but would appreciate constructive help and support. It will avoid nugatory work by me and others here. --(WT-en) SaxonWarrior 15:05, 21 May 2011 (EDT)
Project:Consensus is the guiding principle for decision making. Achieving consensus can sometimes take a while, but in this case there seems to be some agreement that adding quickbars for the German states is a good starting point for further discussion so I think you would be fine to move ahead with that, and it should give everyone involved the ability to come to some sort of agreement using a concrete implementation for discussion purposes. I think one of the fears many people here have (myself included) is that it is a significant amount of work to agree to standards and guidelines on a wiki, so anything that introduces major changes (in this case a modification to high level regions) tends to require a lot of time and discussion to find a mutually-acceptable solution. In the end, however, things usually work out for the best :) -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 15:38, 21 May 2011 (EDT)
Thanks Ryan, I can understand the nervousness, especially when time and effort has been spent getting it to where it is today. --(WT-en) SaxonWarrior 16:05, 21 May 2011 (EDT)

I think adding a quick bar would be useful for regions and cities, as they would provide necessary information that is hard to write about in the Understand section. To get a scope of what a city/region is like, it is useful to know its amount of inhabitants and its sq. km., but writing this out in prose is kind of dull. Also, quick bars could make the site look more professional, just like Wikipedia features quick bars on most of its places.

The only thing I'm not sure about is regions that do not have official borders, such as Northern Germany. Adding a quick bar for those regions does not make sense as there are no criteria for what "Northern Germany" actually consists of. --(WT-en) globe-trotter 14:17, 1 June 2011 (EDT)

I would love to never do this... This should be no surprise given my diatribes here, where I (and others) have listed complaints against this dreaded template in great detail (so I won't repeat them all here). I would prefer to eliminate them from countries instead, as it takes up too much space, duplicates work that should be done in the subsections of the article, adds all sorts of unwarranted emphasis to trivial pieces of information, and generally look like an awkward Wikipedia import that do not further our aims. Just my opinion of course, although I was sort of under the impression that we were moving at least in the direction of getting rid of them altogether prior to this discussion. --(WT-en) Peter Talk 19:59, 2 June 2011 (EDT)
I think there is a distinct split in opinion here, even amongst some seasoned WT veterans. I would be very surprised if we ever reach concensus for a change - some folks clearly like the idea of a neat, tabulated solution for stats, and others like a prose-driven approach.--(WT-en) Burmesedays 22:48, 2 June 2011 (EDT)

Flag sizes (pub discussion)

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Swept in from the pub

In every country guide, there is a national flag at the top of the page. Many flags are used without specifying the image sizes. That is, the image is used in its full default size. People have tagged flags with "NowCommons" for replacement by other flag images in a different size. If you suddenly notice that the flag is 1000 pixels wide instead of 100 pixels wide, this typically means that the "new" flag is a lot bigger. I try to remember to fix this manually, but it's possible that I might sometimes have missed this. If you see any enormous flags somewhere, please fix the size as fast as you can. Flags may also be of abnormal size on other language versions, but I try to check the flags there too. Also, if you see a country article without a flag size specified, consider adding a flag size even if the flag currently is small. --Stefan2 (talk) 13:00, 4 November 2012 (CET)

I noticed the same thing. Is it possible to set the template to automatically size the images to a specific size? It may save having to fix flags on hundreds of articles. JamesA >talk 00:51, 5 November 2012 (CET)
Not easily; Template:Quickbar assumes a full file-link syntax as the template parameter. The example clearly shows the flag sized to 108px, so if that wasn't done it was a misuse of the template. LtPowers (talk) 01:05, 5 November 2012 (CET)

Flag sizes

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This was previously briefly discussed at Wikivoyage:Travellers'_pub#Flag_sizes, but confusion seems to be ongoing. The precedent is 108px as defined by this template, but there are many users who are changing it to all sorts of values. Some are changing it to 108px per the template, but most are changing it to a standard 100px. Then some are setting the flag size to the max area that it will fit, so about 250px. We need one clear standard.

I'd actually recommend changing the template so that it sets the default size, not users. Then having a bot (or manually) go through and change all the flags on articles with the Quickbar template. JamesA >talk 10:57, 12 November 2012 (UTC)Reply

Changing the template to hardcode the size would require changing the syntax, I believe. So it'd have to be a coordinated action to change everything soon after the change to the template. LtPowers (talk) 14:51, 12 November 2012 (UTC)Reply
Oh, and there is also the small issue of Nepal's flag, which is of nonstandard proportions. LtPowers (talk) 14:51, 12 November 2012 (UTC)Reply
That's right, we would have to change the template then immediately go through the list and remove the syntax. I'd be happy to do it. We are in beta, so having some more red links for an hour or two is no catastrophe. It's better to get this issue fixed now rather than later. About Nepal (Switzerland, etc), we can set a parameter for a custom size when required. JamesA >talk 07:09, 13 November 2012 (UTC)Reply

Changes

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I've been testing a number of changes to this template regarding the images. My testing took place at User:JamesA/sandbox using User:JamesA/quickbar. Following on from the discussion above and in the Pub, I've made some changes to streamline the template:

  • [[File: |noframe]] formatting is no longer required for all 3 images
  • Template:Quickbar image and Template:Quickbar topimage have been merged into the main Quickbar template to make it more compact and usable, and for better organisation.
  • The width for the image/location will default to 250px, and flags to 108px
  • The widths can be manually defined using |imagewidth=,|locationwidth= and |flagwidth=
  • There is now a |caption= field that makes a caption appear when lead images are hovered over. There is the opportunity in future to make captions appear below the image as well, but I haven't done that at this stage. This was mainly to preserve captions on articles which have them.

These changes will make operation simpler, but there won't be any huge difference so I will most likely plunge forward and do it with the trusty help of User:RomaineBot. This is just an outline of the changes. JamesA >talk 09:33, 13 November 2012 (UTC)Reply

Further to this, I'd propose changing the location maps from the low-res grey/green PNG versions we have to new high-res coloured SVG versions on Commons. It's an extremely simple task; most of the time, it's just a matter of changing the .png suffix to .svg. In general, wikis are encouraged to change PNGs to SVGs when available as they're much more detailed. Here's an example: commons:File:LocationCuba.svg. If no one opposes over the next few days, I'll go ahead with the change. JamesA >talk 11:08, 15 November 2012 (UTC)Reply
Aesthetically, I prefer the monochrome maps. I checked out how the maps looked in Cuba, and I agree the SVG is a better quality map, but the green-on-monochrome scheme is more appealing in the context of the quickbar. But then I looked at Mexico, and I think the SVG is clearly not an improvement there. At the size these maps are displayed, the borders between countries are very faint, and the low contrast between the land and water colors makes the shapes of the continents hard to discern. Green-on-gray-on-white looks much clearer to me.
Also, it appears that not all countries have a locator map in that color scheme (Kuwait, for example).
All told, I think this is not a necessary move at this time. LtPowers (talk) 14:06, 15 November 2012 (UTC)Reply
I also prefer the monochrome colours, but I feel the SVGs have greater detail and clarity in terms of their borders, while the PNGs are generally low-res. The SVG does very badly in that Mexico example, and while it is no improvement over the PNG, I don't think the PNG has anything on the SVG either. Regardless, both still serve their purpose of showing where Mexico is in relation to the world. Country borders in Africa are irrelevant. Mexico's borders can be seen clearly in its regions map.
One area the green/grey maps need significant help is islands. Take a look at File:LocationBritishVirginIslands.png, or really, any other map of an island country and you can barely see where the country is. Tokelau's another example. Some of the coloured maps have circles around small islands, but coverage is patchy.
The fact that many countries such as Kuwait, and numerous Caribbean/Pacific islands, are missing maps in that style, I'll also give this one a pass. I'll see if I can help out over at Commons in finishing off the rest of the countries, or possibly even propose the same green/grey theme, but in SVG. JamesA >talk 14:39, 15 November 2012 (UTC)Reply

Two weeks later: Is there any progress in updating individual articles? I constantly stumble upon [[File: and other stuff that became redundant after this change. Should I correct them manually? --Alexander (talk) 14:04, 28 November 2012 (UTC)Reply

I updated everything up to E but it's a difficult effort and I'm quite busy now. I had been hoping for User:Romaine to deploy his bot, but I'm not sure when that is going to happen at this point. You may like to ask him. Otherwise, manual correcting is fine and doesn't affect the bot negatively if it does get deployed. JamesA >talk 11:19, 3 December 2012 (UTC)Reply

Quickbar problems?

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Swept here from the pub

While pointlessly working on an Island nation article, I happened upon some formatting problems. I've fixed Montserrat but there may be others out there (like Navassa Island for example)... -- Alice 07:42, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

I made this change a few weeks back as per Template_talk:Quickbar#Changes. I tirelessly tried going through the Whatlinkshere to change all the articles manually, but it's a long job and I only got up to (not including) E. Please continue if you can. I believe Romaine did have a bot solution, but that has not been deployed yet. JamesA >talk 11:35, 14 January 2013 (UTC)Reply
I forgot all about this. I have now fixed all the quickbars that still had to be done. --Globe-trotter (talk) 14:37, 14 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

Thanks guys, for your rapid and effective response. -- Alice 20:34, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

Idea: Emergency number templates

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Swept in from the pub
EMERGENCY
DIAL: 911
EMERGENCY
DIAL: 999 or 112
EMERGENCY

FIRE & AMBULANCE: 119

POLICE:110

Here's an idea I just had. What about putting a countries emergency number in a bright red easy to see box? The reason being that if you were traveling in a strange land and relying on a WikiVoyage guide (yay!) and an emergency were to occur, you'd want to find the number fast and not be reading through pages of text for it. I have made some mock ups of what they might look like on the right. 83.70.217.140 21:11, 26 February 2013 (UTC)Reply

Excellent idea and implementation! Go for it! -- Alice 21:16, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
Perhaps this could be an addition to the quick facts template we have for country articles? I could definitely see that working. PerryPlanet (talk) 21:35, 26 February 2013 (UTC)Reply
In an emergency, "112" can be dialed on GSM cell phones worldwide to reach emergency services, regardless of the local emergency number (eg. in the U.S., it redirects to 911). AHeneen (talk) 21:46, 26 February 2013 (UTC)Reply
Yes, that's a great number to know (you can even dial it when the keypad of yiour GSM phone is locked or even if there is no SIM card inside or you otherwise have no roaming access to a local network). However, there are quite a few countries where 112 does NOT work - North Korea is one. -- Alice 22:00, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
For that matter, some of us are on CDMA. 112 is not worldwide on anything other than GSM. K7L (talk) 05:33, 28 February 2013 (UTC)Reply

I really like this template - definitely something that I would support implementing. --Nick (talk) 22:25, 26 February 2013 (UTC)Reply

Let's think about this for a bit, though. How helpful is it, really? Let's consider the use cases: If the traveler is relying on a printed guide, he'd still have to page through the book/booklet to find the gaudy red template, and if it's in black and white it loses a fair bit of its distinctiveness. It would be just as easy to turn to the Stay Safe section. On the other hand, if the traveler is using our mobile site, the Stay Safe section is collapsed by default, so he would still have to find and click on the Stay Safe section to see the giant red box. So what does this actually gain him? LtPowers (talk) 22:36, 26 February 2013 (UTC)Reply
Sorry, my response above was a tad quick - what I should have said is that I support its implementation in the 'quick facts' box, as mentioned above. --Nick (talk) 22:40, 26 February 2013 (UTC)Reply
Yes, PerryPlanet & Nick are right. Put this in the quick facts box. --Inas (talk) 23:36, 26 February 2013 (UTC)Reply
Just as an aside, even if we ultimately don't implement this template, I still think we should put emergency numbers in the quick facts box. The fact that we haven't already feels like an oversight. PerryPlanet (talk) 02:28, 27 February 2013 (UTC)Reply
Support for insertion in the quick facts box - however LtPowers comment is important - sats (talk) 10:10, 27 February 2013 (UTC)Reply
One caution which was raised on fr:'s café des voyageurs: 9-1-1 or its equivalents don't necessarily exist everywhere in each country. Certainly the European Union is promoting 1-1-2 as a transnational standard, but in Canada 9-1-1 deployments were mostly provincial or local, leaving the sparsely-populated territories in the High Arctic with no standard distress number for most points. K7L (talk) 03:24, 19 May 2013 (UTC)Reply

Implementation and placement of Quickbar/working

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Much to my delight, we did develop a consensus above to use Quickbar/working, thus getting rid of the fluff. We didn't agree on where to put it, though, which has (really) delayed its implementation. Since we plan to move to a horizontal ToC, I'll happily drop my opposition to putting it at the top (instead of at the top of Understand). I think I was the main holdout, so can we make the change now? Someone is switching the quickbar/workings back to the quickbar, and I'd like to halt that, since it's work to change the fields. --Peter Talk 16:29, 22 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

If it's to go at the top, it needs to allow a lead photograph. And then we get into issues of text being squeezed between the TOC and the quickbar again, which was the whole problem in the first place. I'd like to see an example of it on a live article. LtPowers (talk) 19:50, 22 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
I'd seen sporadic implementations of Quickbar/working and wasn't sure what to make of it. I strongly oppose putting it under the Understand section but can see the issue with text squeezed between the TOC. As it's been quite awhile since the old consensus, would it be worth reassessing the situation? Possibly we should leave this on hold until we have time to discuss a horizontal TOC and determine where consensus goes on that. JamesA >talk 10:21, 25 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
I think a horizontal TOC isn't too far off in the future, which will make this way less of a problem. Having it at the top is essentially the status quo. --Peter Talk 15:20, 25 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Now that we have the Pagebanner ToC, it looks pretty brilliant at the top. I'm inclined to (finally) restore the navigation sections' rightful place above Understand and to finish the long-awaited switch to the shorter quickbar. See American Samoa for an exemplar. (It looks so, so much cleaner than before!) --Peter Talk 20:27, 16 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
It's certainly an improvement, but it's still not quite right. Looking at the American Samoa page, I see "American Samoa" functioning as a caption or title in no less than four places: in the pagebanner, as the first two words of the lead, in the quickbar, and at the top of the regions map. That strikes me as too many. I wonder if there's something else we could put at the top of the quickbar instead of the country name. LtPowers (talk) 00:39, 17 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
Good point. Maybe "Quick facts"? --Peter Talk 05:13, 17 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
If we change the name to "Quick facts", it would look odd next to the country's flag. One possibility could be moving the flag into the banner, possibly to the left of the country's name or the top/bottom-right. Or we could simply centre the flag in the quickbar and get rid of the title. JamesA >talk 05:20, 17 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
I really like the idea of getting rid of the title and centering the flag in the Quickbar. Any objections? --Peter Talk 23:04, 17 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
If we are going to keep the current style of banner article titles and positioning of this chopped down quickbar, then we certainly don't need one article title just below another. However, I'd like to keep the flag at right and put another snippet of information (eg: the country's Capital?) to the left of it - it's visually better balanced that way.-- Alice 23:44, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
The issue with putting some other piece of info next to the flag is that it looks like the two are interrelated, but a capital city and the country's flag are two different things. Only the name of the country would fit well next to it. I personally think it looks more balanced with the flag centred. JamesA >talk 06:56, 18 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
We could just ditch the flag altogether. Is it really important for the traveler to know? LtPowers (talk) 14:08, 18 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
I think yes. It's always good to know the flag of the country you're about to enter. It's like the map; why do we need the map? You don't need to know the country's general location to fly there. It's just good to know these things... JamesA >talk 14:14, 18 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
I've always thought the flag was a real waste of space and not travel-relevant, but we have always been unable to reach a consensus on that. To me it's mostly important to finally get moving after these years of discussion ;) --Peter Talk 14:40, 18 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
Why is it good to know what the flag of the country looks like? I can't believe you'd really compare that to a map, James. LtPowers (talk) 16:04, 18 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
It may seem odd to compare the map to the flag, but how are they that different? Technically, most of what the map tells the reader is already stated in the article: neighbouring countries, relative size, continent, etc, plus there is a more significant regions map further down. I'm not proposing we remove the map, I just don't believe we should be so stringent about parameters like the flag, which is never described in the article. JamesA >talk 00:44, 19 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
I'm just saying, if there's no aesthetically pleasing way to do it (Alice's idea below might work, though), then what's so important about having it in the article? Or, alternatively, in the quickbar specifically (it could be included later in the Understand section). LtPowers (talk) 03:12, 19 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
I'm open to moving the flag or changing how it's displayed, but not outright removing it. JamesA >talk 07:31, 19 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
Yes, you keep saying that but have yet to explain why. LtPowers (talk) 14:34, 19 May 2013 (UTC)Reply

Given that we only use Quickbar or Quickbar/working with Country level articles, I suggest that we have a special kind of combined Quickbar and Banner title, using the horizontal paradigm for country articles.

The flag could replace the photo as a graphic and the navigation would follow the (horizontally laid out) quick facts. -- Alice 22:48, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

It seems we're going to keep hitting impasses in trying to decide whether or not to have the flag. I really don't think it's that big of an issue, and doesn't cause a significant amount of problems. Either way, I've made some changes to the Quickbar/working template based off the suggestions, implementing them at User:JamesA/quickbar.

  • Removed country name
  • Centred flag
  • Removed borders and varying colours to better match the borderless banner
  • Template now automatically adds "File:" prefix, for a simpler transfer from current template.

You can see it in action at Qatar. Thoughts? James Atalk 07:07, 24 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Not bad, but I'd like to see a border around it, or at least a darker background. Also, I'd like to see how it looks with the Understand section returned to the proper place. LtPowers (talk) 11:59, 24 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
I also think it may need a light border, but preferably a darker colour that would match the banner. By "proper place", I assume you mean below regions/cities/other destinations like every other non-country article. Qatar is not a great example, as it has no regions section/map, so I had a go at Somaliland. It seems to push the regions map slightly, but nothing jarring, certainly much, much better than before. James Atalk 13:34, 24 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
Qatar does have a map! Ideally I would suggest getting rid of the locator map, since every single country article does have a map courtesy of the Regions map Expedition, as does every region above the country level of the hierarchy—the locator map's information is redundant, not to mention out-of-step with Wikivoyage's visual style. (It's still useful, but IMO not useful enough to justify it.) Removing that and the flag would make the Quickbar truly quick, and keep it from bumping against the regions map that should always follow it. I don't know if I'll ever get consensus for this, though ;) Otherwise, the only way to solve the problem of the Quickbar bumping the regions map out of alignment with the regions section would be to work on longer, richer ledes for all country articles—which is probably a good long-term goal anyway. --Peter Talk 18:29, 24 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
The locator map is hugely useful to me - I'm not particularly geographically challenged, but I find it very useful for determining a country's location in relation to others. The region maps also provide that information, but that assumes you are browsing down the breadcrumb trail rather than browsing from city-to-country or visiting an article via some other path. -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:35, 24 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
I agree with Ryan, as long we are careful to use the traditional map-projection locator maps rather than the globes that have been popping up lately. LtPowers (talk) 20:06, 24 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
I also agree that the locator maps assist travellers in determining where exactly a country is, rather than what's inside it. About the globe maps, I also prefer against them. While we're at it, we need to standardise the locator maps across guides. We did discuss this, but I'm seeing the yellow/red SVG maps popping up left, right and centre. PS - About Qatar, it has a map but it's not a regions map, and it's in the Get in section :P James Atalk 01:03, 25 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

OK, OK, so we're not getting rid of the locator maps, and for some unknown reason people think the flags are worth keeping. Perhaps we could shorten the bar vertically by putting them side by side? The flag looks a little extra odd now that the country name has been removed, leaving a huge blank horizontal buffer to the flag's sides. But removing that flag from the Quickbar might solve our problems altogether... If people really think it's necessary, maybe we could put it somewhere else, like next to the country name in the region maps, in the shadow box around the country name in the ToC banner, or at the end of the breadcrumb trail? --Peter Talk 04:56, 25 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

How about Somaliland now? The size of the flag had to be nearly halved to properly fit next to the text (I guess you guys aren't worried about that), but I'm willing to compromise. It didn't really make a huge difference as the quickbar still pushes the regions map down. But again, I don't think it is a major problem. Apart from sorting out the border/colour, I think we're ready to go. James Atalk 07:44, 25 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
One other suggestion which should be uncontroversial and helpful would be to reduce the vertical spacing between lines in the Quickbar, which is noticeably greater than our usual line spacing. The locator map seems bigger than it needs to be (because of the fairly high horizontal width of the Quickbar), but I don't have a great suggestion for that—maybe just force a slightly smaller width for the locator map (allowing some space around it) to reduce its vertical impact just a bit. And yes, a border would improve the appearance a good deal. --Peter Talk 18:22, 25 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
I've added a thin border, reduced vertical linespacing, removed padding around the locator map and decreased space below the quickbar. It's quite a snug fit now. Are people happy with the implementation at Somaliland, with the flag in the pagebanner? James Atalk 10:56, 7 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
I think that's the best version of the Quickbar yet, and would be happy to see the small version (finally) implemented, and the nav sections finally restored to where they belong—at the top. As the Somaliland example shows, most countries may still benefit from a <br clear="all" /> before the regions section, but that should no longer create tons of whitespace on country articles that have any sort of prose in the lede. --Peter Talk 05:06, 10 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
Should the clear=all be added to the template, or on a case-by-case basis to the article directly? And regarding the flag, should there be a parameter within the pagebanner template or can we just add it to the pgname like what is done on Somaliland? And finally, should this be promoted more widely at the pub? James Atalk 05:31, 10 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
I think it will need to be added case-by-case, mainly because it will (I think) usually belong at the bottom of the lede section, rather than the bottom of the template. I think adding the flags to the pgname makes the most sense, since adding them will just be a one-off thing (aside from the creation of new countries). And I'm all for promoting the initiative to implement the change, but I don't want to present this as an open call for opinions/opportunity to last-ditch unravel the consensus we've worked for years to achieve ;) --Peter Talk 07:01, 10 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
Makes sense to me. I've gone ahead and implemented the modified template into Quickbar/working. I started going through whatlinkshere, but don't have enough time and only got up to Bermuda. If someone wants to, feel free to finish off the changes, including removing redundant parameters from the quickbar, removing "File:" from the quickbar, moving the flag to the pgname in the banner, and moving the cities/destinations sections back to the top. See this for an example of changes. James Atalk 07:49, 10 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
Can't we just move Template:Quickbar/working to Template:Quickbar now and adjust everything later? Then we don't have to go back through after the move and change all instances of the former back to the latter. (On another note, which edit history is more important to retain? We'll have to decide which one to delete.) LtPowers (talk) 14:03, 10 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
It's possible to merge edit histories. I can do it tomorrow if that's what's wanted. As for implementing the change immediately, there will be no negative consequences/redlinks. It's just a matter of carrying out the manual changes I mentioned above. James Atalk 14:09, 10 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
It's possible, but I'm not sure it's desirable in this case, as it may mislead someone in the future as to when the change occurred, and how. LtPowers (talk) 17:29, 10 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
We could just move the old one to Quickbar/Old and move in the new. I'd happily help with the fairly large amount of manual labor, although I'll be out of commission over the weekend. --Peter Talk 18:36, 10 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
Right. Duh. LtPowers (talk) 18:47, 10 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
Okay, after nearly merging the histories, I managed to read the above and instead moved the original quickbar to Template:Quickbar/old. The talk pages haven't moved, as even most of the discussion about quickbar/working took place here. Links are provided to both at the top of this page. Anyway, congrats everyone on finally coming to an agreement and implementing this sitewide, after years of consensus-building. Now to fix the mess on a couple of hundred pages. James Atalk 13:37, 11 July 2013 (UTC)Reply

Flag in the banner caption

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I am now skimming through this talk page to find where you reached the consensus to move the country flag to the caption, as User:Globe-trotter did with Netherlands (telling me he is implementing a policy/guideline agreed here), but I just have to say that it does really look awful and I would rather we did not do it and kept the flag within the template in any way. I guess the discussion on why, why not, how and all is far too advanced for me to join in informedly, but I just wanted to voice my strong opposition to including the flag in the banner.

By the way, if you wish to do that, wouldn't it be good to have it discussed with Wikivoyage:Banner Expedition first. There are members thereof who never wandered here, like myself before pointed out by Globe-trotter. PrinceGloria (talk) 04:24, 13 July 2013 (UTC)Reply

We are used to having few enough contributors that pretty much everyone was involved in every corner of the site, more or less. =) The problem with the flag in the quickbar is that there's really no room for it. The quickbar needs to be as short as possible. Many of us don't think the flag is necessary at all, but this seemed like an acceptable compromise. What is it you don't like about the flag? LtPowers (talk) 15:03, 13 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
Well, let us get used to the fact that the community is growing and not everybody will be able to be involved everywhere and know all the policies, guidelines and such. This is important enough to be discussed both with the Banner Expedition, at RfC or even at Traveller's Pub IMHO before implementation. And I would rather do this with every major change - first discuss and then announce the compromise at the Pub.
I don't like it because it is poorly aligned with the text and the colours often clash with the banner background. It also makes the smooth, elegant banner layout seem garish and clumsy. It is evident the banner was not designed with including the flag in mind.
I personally believe the flag is necessary in a country article, it is worthwhile to know how it looks like. I do not think everybody going to Vanuatu can tell the flag, and it would be advisable for them to be able to. If you don't want it in the quickbar, let us discuss at the Pub where to put it. PrinceGloria (talk) 16:41, 13 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
PS. IMHO the quickbar is still painfully clumsy compared to the otherwise smooth looks the banners afforded the site, so I could still a long way ahead of it, but that's my personal opinion.
Firstly I don't really have any problem with having the country's flag up in the banner. But as I accidentally found this discussion I really have to say that the new "chopped" quickbars where the lead picture and the flag are removed look pretty sad... outright anemic. What would you think about making a completely new quickbar, a horizontal one which would be placed right under the banner? The background could be black and the text white, just like the link section in the banner. And as the map won't fit in such a narrow box - let's ditch it just like the seemingly unpopular flag and lead picture. All country articles in Wikivoyage have their own map in the district section and when you need the larger picture many countries already have a link to maps.wikivoyage-ev.org above the banner. ϒpsilon (talk) 21:21, 13 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
So, a national flag is completely vital information for the traveler to know immediately upon viewing the article, while the location of the country in the world is secondary information that can be accessed via a click or two? That is entirely and completely backwards. PrinceGloria, why is it "worthwhile" to know what the flag looks like? And even if it is, can't it go in the Understand section instead of right at the top of the article? LtPowers (talk) 13:49, 14 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
Both are important, I have no problem with the flag in the "Understand" section, I have a problem with it in the banner caption. Kindest, PrinceGloria (talk) 18:45, 14 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
PS. It is better to know how a flag of the country you are going to visit looks like for orientation (there are many places online and in the actual world where it can be used to help people find their way or click the right thing), as well as for general knowledge. We might just as well decide we will not provide the information as to which city is the capital, but I believe it is worthwhile to do.
Well, some of those questions were directed at Ypsilon. =) But as for the capital, I agree; since the capital is always the first city listed in the Cities section, I don't know if it really needs to be in the quickbar. LtPowers (talk) 19:24, 14 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
The more I see flags in the banner, the more I become convinced that it although it was a well-intentioned plan, it isn't working well in practice. It's the only non-text element overlaid on the banner, making it look out of place to begin with; the sizing often ends up awkward (it looks too tall on Aruba with the lack of any descenders in those letters, too short on Qatar due to its aspect ratio, etc., etc.); and it's jarring to see this unusual element on only the relatively tiny pool of the ~200 country pages relative to the overwhelming majority where it would never be used - as opposed to the quickbar template, which is not trying to serve double duty like that, and I'd now be inclined to move the flag image back there. The point about the capital is a good one that suddenly seems obvious now that it's pointed out -- why is that quickbar material? Nothing else in the current quickbar is routinely duplicated in the article text. -- D. Guillaume (talk) 19:41, 14 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
To quote PrinceGloria above "the quickbar is still painfully clumsy compared to[…] the banner". I agree. While I thought the old version was quite OK, I really don't think the current two colored square box is any better. That's why I figured: why don't change it into a horizontal bar and put it under the banner instead (or somewhere else, or get rid of the quickbar completely: population -> who needs it?, currency -> buy, electricity & time zone -> cope and calling code->connect ?). Another alternative would be to give the quickbar a bit more life in some other way, maybe with a "happier" map or something else. And about the flag: of course the flag isn't absolutely necessary to have in an article, but I cannot see any harm in having it there either. ϒpsilon (talk) 20:07, 14 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
I am happy to see somebody else (thank you, Ypsilon) mention it first - I also believe the current limited collection of information in the quickbar could just as well, or even better, be contained within the article, and it often just as well is. I see no benefit of having it collected in a quickbar - it may be easier to find and ensure that it is included in the article, but I guess there is not that much need to have it in a table (most people will read the entire guide anyway, and for specific information, there is Wikipedia), while enforcing all articles to contain that info does not have to be done via quickbar.
I would seriously consider getting rid of the quickbar given how contentious it is - look at this talk page! PrinceGloria (talk) 20:47, 14 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
The contentiousness is why we haven't gotten rid of it. Some users have tried in the past, but others find it valuable, so we've attempted to minimize its impact as much as possible. Adding the flag to it would disrupt that. LtPowers (talk) 15:41, 15 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
I'm sorry, but we're really starting to lose the point of a quickbar. Can we please just look at what it's called? That's usually a good indicator of its purpose: the quickbar. It is a way of quickly obtaining information. We may love making comprehensive guides, but I'm a strong believer that if something is too long, it really loses its usefulness and defeats the purpose. If you're deciding on what country to go to, you don't need to know how many ATMs there are, just what's the currency. And if you're already in that country in some shoddy internet cafe with 5 minutes of internet usage, you don't have 2 hours to read our entire country guide! I for one never read an entire guide. The quickbar helps alleviate that. It puts it all right at the top, so you know the bare essentials before going to a country.
It was mentioned that a lot of quickbar info can be found in other sections. Yes, but that isn't the point. We shouldn't be telling people they can go to Wikipedia if they want to know data like the population. Or that if they want to know the currency or time zones, they can find it in one of the other sections. How are they to know which section to look in, as it's not always immediately apparent. We're starting to lose the point of a quickbar, and it's upsetting that a discussion that took years is now being thrown out the window. James Atalk 07:48, 16 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
On the face of it, I agree with James. We can talk about whether certain types of information are or aren't important to include, but I hope no-one is considering deleting the thumbnail maps that show the location of countries relative to other countries in their region. Currency information is also important. Remember, the traveller comes first. Ikan Kekek (talk) 14:31, 16 July 2013 (UTC)Reply

Removing redundant code

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I hadn't seen any of this discussion before (whoops!), but is it now worth setting up a bot to remove the redundant code from our articles, so hapless people like myself don't get very confused? --Nick talk 18:57, 14 September 2013 (UTC)Reply

Languages

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Texugo reverted my edit which added a language section for a consensus claim. Then I wonder how would that now hidden section in articles, such as Chad would appear now? All of that (French & Arabic (official); Chadian Arabic (lingua franca) plus more than 150 indigenous languages & dialects) is now hidden. --Mahmudmasri (talk) 18:58, 23 October 2013 (UTC)Reply

(The following was moved from a user talk page)

Language in the quickbar

Hi there. You probably noticed I reverted your addition of a language field to the quickbar. That is because there was a consensus to remove it, on the talk page of that template. Of course you can read the discussion there, but basically we have been trying to make the quickbar as small as possible because it causes layout problem when it is too long, and it duplicates information which already has a dedicated section in the article (as in the case of language), or is too encyclopedia (in some other cases). The answer to "what language" is also too complex for many countries to give a short answer in the quickbar. Texugo (talk) 18:59, 23 October 2013 (UTC)Reply

Hi, Mahmudmasri. I put a note on your talk page, but yes, language was intentionally removed from the quickbar by consensus in one of the discussions above. The information about languages should always be covered in the article's Talk section. Texugo (talk) 19:01, 23 October 2013 (UTC)Reply
Would you please leave a direct link to the section or tell me where is the discussion? I can't find it in that very long page. --Mahmudmasri (talk) 19:06, 23 October 2013 (UTC)Reply
Well, it's a long a convoluted path which started in 2007 at #Delete the Quickbar, by which a new quickbar was eventually developed at Template talk:Quickbar/working, and then implemented in early July of this year via discussion under #Implementation and placement of Quickbar/working. Texugo (talk) 19:31, 23 October 2013 (UTC)Reply

Add a class to the enclosing div rather than i

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I'm a developer and I'm building an app based on Wikivoyage data and the Parsoid API that powers VisualEditor and I'm struggling to display the infobox correctly as I am unable to accurately identify where it is in the article. The id `quickbar` is dropped in Parsoid (as are all ids) so a class would be useful for identifying this programmatically. Can one be added or could the id attribute be replaced with a class? Thanks in advance for your answer! Jdlrobson (talk) 21:31, 21 September 2016 (UTC)Reply

I've added a "wv-quickbar" class to the container div. Is that sufficient for your needs? -- Ryan • (talk) • 21:37, 21 September 2016 (UTC)Reply

Switching {{Quickbar}} to Wikidata

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Swept in from the pub

Hello everyone,

I'm working on a replacement (on the right for Andorra) for {{Quickbar}} which uses Wikidata instead of locally entered information. It's almost ready, I'm only waiting for a property proposal related to the electricity field. What do you think? Could it be deployed like this (after we have the electricity property)?

Warm regards, -- T.seppelt (talk) 14:50, 26 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

Full support from me, seems like a great idea. Thanks for working on this. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:25, 26 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
Had done something similar about a year ago though I had added flag, image, bordering countries and description - this I like as it is simpler and less cluttered. -- Go for it! - good exercise. -- Matroc (talk) 19:02, 26 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
Quickbars used to be standard on this site, didn't they? Why did we get rid of them in the first place? Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:54, 26 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
We didn't. They should still be on every Country article. Powers (talk) 21:13, 26 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
250+ articles have quickbars (template) - Matroc (talk) 22:04, 26 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
However compared to other language editions they contain much less detail. And some language editions also have them in every city article as well... Hobbitschuster (talk) 21:36, 26 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
It looks great, but I prefer the smaller locator maps we currently use. We've found the quickbars often push more appealing visual content down, so we've kept them as short as possible vertically. Powers (talk) 21:15, 26 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
Hmmm! -- Unfortunately what is in Wikidata is what you will get; be it a map, banner or an image, perhaps it could be resolved by passing arguments to override the map image etc. that is found in Wikidata... Just a thought -- Matroc (talk) 22:25, 26 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
And so raises one of the major issues with using Wikidata for visual information rather than factual information: different projects have different aesthetic and layout needs. Powers (talk) 23:55, 26 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
Local parameters are stil supported. We will be able to decide step by step which information we want from Wikidata. --T.seppelt (talk) 04:22, 27 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
For what it's worth, I prefer the map in the Andorra example above as it conveys more information than the map currently in use at Andorra, and I like the idea that our locator maps would be consistent with those used at other projects. Insofar as the argument against Wikidata is that it reduces local control, I think the benefits of having the data kept up-to-date and in sync across projects outweighs the disadvantage of not having that info directly editable here, particularly since we can override it locally if needed. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:14, 27 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
Having it "automatically" updated is a bonus as long as the vandals do not find their way to Wikidata. I, at least, have a hard time figuring out which Wikidata edits one should check and which one can trust. I also think pluralism is good, in the cases there are resources to maintain different versions. It is often valuable to be able to check something on other projects, which may use a slightly different definition or other sources, or be more easy for me to understand (cf the two locator maps – I have no problem recognizing Spain, but others may have). --LPfi (talk) 17:54, 27 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
It's all well and good to prefer the large map aesthetically, but fitting it into our articles in a harmonious manner is a different story. As for commonality among projects, English Wikipedia uses a different set of locator maps; these are primarily used in German Wikipedia and a few other low-population Wikipedias. There are several other sets of locator maps, as well. Powers (talk) 20:13, 27 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
Could be a good timing to steal this additional piece of German technology: "It also picks the qualifiers on wikidata for population and it compares your own data with wikidata. So you can activate Wikidata Tools do get a bigger quickbar with additional information like "different altitude on Wikidata" or something like that, including tools to edit Wikidata/the article." https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikivoyage/Summit#February_2016 Cheers! Syced (talk) 08:17, 28 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

Is it worth adding Driving Side? -- WOSlinker (talk) 10:20, 28 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

I added it. I'd like to keep the quickbar as simple as possible. If you want to travel to a country you don't need information about GDP, the president or the unemployment rate. All of our country articles are connected to Wikipedia articles. This is the place we one can get further information. –T.seppelt (talk) 14:02, 28 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
The Plug Type that you were waiting for is now available. -- WOSlinker (talk) 15:34, 28 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
I know. I am actually waiting for d:Wikidata:Property proposal/Sister projects#mains voltage because I'd like to have both the voltage and the plug type in one row as it is in Andorra. Your input would be appreciated at the property proposal discussion, I guess. -- T.seppelt (talk) 07:53, 29 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

@Wrh2, Matroc, LtPowers, Hobbitschuster, LPfi, Syced, WOSlinker: I actived the new version now. Please have a look at Andorra. I'm going to move the data of other country articles also to Wikidata and remove the local parameters. Warm regards, -- T.seppelt (talk) 07:26, 2 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

T.seppelt, I'd suggest you wait a bit. It doesn't look to me like Powers is convinced this is the best course of action. Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:33, 2 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
I agree. We should come to a conclusion first. -- T.seppelt (talk) 07:39, 2 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
The only concern raised was about the map image, right? Since the local param will override Wikidata, as long as the map is left as-is (for now) I think it should be fine to defer to Wikidata for other fields, and we can continue to discuss whether to use Wikidata maps or the current maps in the interim. -- Ryan • (talk) • 17:22, 2 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
That's right. I can leave the overwrite for the map image even though I'd prefer to keep it consistent. -- T.seppelt (talk) 17:42, 2 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
Consistent with what? As I pointed out above, a variety of locator map sets are used throughout WMF projects. This particular one is used on a handful of Wikipedias, most prominently German, but it's far from universal. Powers (talk) 19:29, 2 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
If you use quickbar on a WV page that is not found in Wikidata you will get a Lua error because you are trying to build an edit link to an entry in Wikidata (which doesn't exist). In this case the item.id which would be nil. (I am not suggesting that a wikidata item be added as a parameter to quickbar; but rather, to skip the creation of the Wikidata edit link in such cases.)
I have to say that I am still a bit cautious and express the need to address everyone's concerns. - Matroc (talk) 23:27, 2 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
@Matroc: the latter is fixed now. The module doesn't create the edit link in these cases anymore. -- T.seppelt (talk) 06:35, 3 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
@T.seppelt: -Thank you.... -- 18:24, 3 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
So, the United States of America article now has a much longer quickbar than it did before. I'm not convinced this is a positive change. Is there an advantage to listing each time zone on its own line instead of just listing the range of timezones? (I shudder to think how Russia will look.) Why include a Euro conversion but not a Canadian dollar, British pound, or Japanese yen conversion? Is the exact date on which the population was estimated important, or is only the year important? Powers (talk) 02:40, 5 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
@LtPowers: I see your point. In general the template just looks up data at Wikidata and displays what it gets (for USA look at Q30). This means that all these information can be edited there. But there is of course also the option to manipulate the output locally. Let's take it step by step:
  • Timezones: It's going to be hard to summarize all this timezones to "UTC−4 to UTC−10". We could either only display a couple of timezones ("UTC−06:00, UTC−07:00, UTC−08:00 and 5 more" or "UTC−06:00, UTC−07:00 ... UTC+12:00, UTC−05:00") but this not really appealing I guess. Or we use the local parameter to overwrite the Wikidata value.
  • Currency conversions: The currency conversions are always based on the data in the currency's item (for USD Q4917). Feel free to add more conversions there. See Ukraine as an example.
  • Date in the population field: If there is consensus for displaying only the year, this can be changed.
The module is pretty much at the beginning. Let's find ways to improve it. Warm regards, -- T.seppelt (talk) 08:00, 5 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
Just wondering with the currency conversion if there is a need to show so many figures. Rather than 1 USD = 0.888375605 Euro, perhaps rounding the values to 4 might be better 1 USD = 0.8884 Euro ? -- WOSlinker (talk) 11:21, 5 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
Two decimal places should be enough, at least for Euros. But that conversion rate is from February anyway. It apparently has to be manually updated, and that isn't happening regularly. I don't think we should show it at all. Powers (talk) 17:35, 5 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

For the timezones, could you loop through the values to workout the MIN and MAX time zones and just show the "MIN to MAX" values? Also, with times such as Hawaii–Aleutian Time Zone, could you then go to that data item d:Q3241537 and see if P460 is set and if it is get the UTC time zone? -- WOSlinker (talk) 11:28, 5 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

I implemented now a new format for the conversions and for the date in the population field. With the timezones it's more complicated because Wikidata doesn't store the offset of a timezone in a structured way. The only possible way would be to parse the offset based on the label of the timezone item which is not error-proof I think. An idea would be to propose a new property "timezone offset" -- T.seppelt (talk) 16:19, 5 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
I'm stunned such a property doesn't already exist. I can't think of any reason we should outsource our data display formats to Wikidata; we should be getting raw data from WD and formatting it *our* way, which is going to be different from the way Wikipedias format it. Powers (talk) 17:35, 5 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
As I said before, what you see in Wikidata is what you get. Editing Wikidata to meet one wiki site's needs is not necessarily the way to go unless Wikidata is completely incorrect for all intents and purposes. I can foresee some future project Wikidata edit wars which we don't need or want ... Using local parameters (overrides) is a better option for those parts that are in question or yet another property could be added to Wikidata.
As far as currency goes, I would want to see a "rupee" symbol rather than "INR" or a "dollar" symbol rather than "USD". That is just me I guess.
The capital listed could possibly be made into a voy link by drilling down and checking if a wikivoyage page exists for that capital. (though this is not 100% perfect either).
The quickbar module is a work in progress and going through transformation - it is good to have these conversations now. I think it is also important to remember that one shoe size does not fit all. Some flexibility has to be made available.
An aside - WOSlinker - wow - I have seen your name pop up many times before and I just remembered that I tested your Module:IsLatin in 2013 on Mediawiki, time flies -- Matroc (talk) 20:40, 5 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
I apologize, I thought I had made it clear that I wasn't suggesting that Wikidata should store our preferred presentation of the data. My point is that Wikidata should not be storing any sort of presentation/formatting at all. It should store raw data, which individual wikis then format as necessary. I'm fine using Wikidata's data; but in no way should we be beholden to Wikidata's choice in how that data is represented. Powers (talk) 21:09, 5 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
I agree - it is what we can do with the raw data that counts most -- Matroc (talk) 21:47, 5 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

Okay. Thank you for your input. I'll try to transform it into some improvements. Firstly the module already works like a formatting unit for raw data which comes from Wikidata. The fields for currency, population, electricity and emergency use advanced formats which are applied locally. And of course this formats can be changed. I didn't intend to say that we should edit Wikidata according to one project's needs. I just said that Wikidata is the place to add, correct and remove information in case information is missing, incorrect or wrong. Let's improve also Wikidata through improving this module. Now:

-- T.seppelt (talk) 06:10, 6 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

  • I think showing "USD" is more important than showing "$", as that is what you will use at the exchange desk. The symbol will be shown in Buy regardless. For the exchange rate, we should have some way to guarantee up to date values or otherwise not show anything (if we want an approximate rate, it can be given in Buy).
  • The timezone is a problem only for a handful of countries, overriding manually is no problem.
  • I would prefer radical rounding of any numbers. USA having 320 M inhabitants is exact enough for any visitor – and with such rounding there is less need to update yearly (and exact numbers are meaningless without date and method of counting, which are better left to Wikipedia).
--LPfi (talk) 16:47, 6 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
The timezone problem should be solved in one week when the property proposal is approved. The rounding can be easily implemented. I'd stil like to see some more comments on this since it's a bit of work. The discussion on the Wikidata Project chat about currency symbols got very deep. I think the ISO abbreviation solution is the best we can get for now. --T.seppelt (talk) 19:11, 6 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
My two cents   ;-)
  • I prefer "USD" to "$", because multiple currencies use "$".
  • Rounding is good. But does "radical rounding" mean three significant figures ("320M" for the US, "331K" for Iceland, "2,910" for the Falklands), or does it mean "320M" for the US, "300K" for Iceland, and "0" for the Falklands? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:12, 6 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
@T.seppelt: For the rounding, you may want to check out make_sigfig and format_number in Module:Convert. -- WOSlinker (talk) 07:04, 7 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
I'm thinking 3 sigfigs is good enough (although it risks looking deceptively precise for places like Pitcairn Islands, I don't think rounding "67" to "70" is necessarily a better idea). I appreciate the dialog we're having here. Powers (talk) 11:06, 7 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

Problem with the new Quickbar

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Swept in from the pub

I noticed on Australia in the {{Quickbar}} that the Great British Pound is a valid currency, which might surprise many Australians :)

The reason is because Wikidata [4] accurately records the GBP as a previous currency of Australia (which it was until 1910), but the Wikibar is picking it up as a current currency.

T.seppelt : Are you able to fix this? Thanks! --Andrewssi2 (talk) 10:07, 8 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

@Andrewssi2: I fixed it. Please see d:Help:Ranking. -- T.seppelt (talk) 10:14, 8 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
Thanks! --Andrewssi2 (talk) 10:36, 8 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
@T.seppelt:- Module Quickbar produces an error in Portugal article -- "Lua error in Module:Quickbar at line 120: bad argument #2 to 'insert' (number expected, got string)" -- Matroc (talk) 08:14, 11 September 2016 (UTC)Reply
Appears to be working correctly now - system cliche? -- Matroc (talk) 09:36, 11 September 2016 (UTC)Reply
I think it was a caching issue since it works now. -- T.seppelt (talk) 17:49, 11 September 2016 (UTC)Reply

Tracking category for new Quickbar

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Swept in from the pub

Hello everyone,

I went through all articles in the main namespace which use {{Quickbar}} and removed the old parameters (the location maps were preserved). In order to add missing information to Wikidata I created a tracking category: Category:Quickbar with missing information. Please help with adding the information to Wikidata. Contact me if you have questions.

Warm regards, -- T.seppelt (talk) 13:13, 27 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

Population accuracy

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The quickbar shows that Finland has a population of "5,501,043±1 (2016)". I would very much prefer "5.5 million" At least the "±1" is utterly unnecessary clutter, and incorrect on top of that. Wikidata values are supposed to include standard deviation, which of course is b**** for register data, and on top of that, "1" is probably a default value.

If it is possible to round values, two or three significant figures should be reasonable in most cases. A value with four significant figures need to be very recent to be meaningful. A yearly population increase or decrease of more than 1 % is probably common (rendering even the third digit an approximation) – and we do not state how the population is counted (citizens or residents? who are residents?) introducing permanent uncertainty of several percent in most countries.

--LPfi (talk) 12:38, 8 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

@T.seppelt: was the one who did the Wikidata integration with the quickbar and might be able to assist. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:00, 8 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
@LPfi, Wrh2: I edited the module. Please check some articles (e.g. Finland, China, Germany, Andorra). What do you think? -- T.seppelt (talk) 14:15, 10 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
Nice! Thank you. --LPfi (talk) 15:50, 10 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

Quickbar breaking layouts?

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Hello! It seems I am very late to the party here, but does the quickbar bother anyone else? It seems to push interesting content further down the page at the expense of, ah, less pressing issues. For example, the very nice map someone made for the USA article is pushed down and text is running over it. Looks unprofessional, but maybe it is just my screen size? Oman pushes the map pretty far down and uses a weird image, United Arab Emirates uses a different (large) style of map. A lot of text overlap going on at Nepal and Uzbekistan as well.

Is there any appetite for only showing the tiny map image along with the "Capital", "Currency", and "Population" stats? This would resolve the majority of the layout issues. I'm not convinced the other stuff needs to be at the top of the article. It should all be covered further down the page anyway, right? I'm sure there are strong and well reasoned opinions about this, but several country level articles are having display issues which is why I bring it up. Thanks! --ButteBag (talk) 02:24, 9 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

These are fields that people felt were important to include all in one space. There's been talk about moving the quickbar to Understand but that was never done. The U.S. box could be made shorter by overriding the time zone info from Wikidata. The Oman and UAE articles are using the wrong map images; they should be small like Nepal has; those can also be overridden. Powers (talk) 14:55, 9 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Lol, nicely done. Vote Powers 2018! I still think the copy running over the image looks bad/unprofessional; and fixing that is more important than telling readers America has a "Chamorro Time Zone". I would support moving the quickbar to Understand, or culling "Electricity" and below, or any other idea that improves the layout of country articles. --ButteBag (talk) 01:06, 10 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Maybe we could restrict output to a single line at least? Anything. --ButteBag (talk) 19:23, 12 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Tend to agree with @ButteBag:, it does not look particularly good with the quickbar encroaching into the region section. Options to improve:
  • Move Quickbar to Understand section
  • Add enough introduction text in the articles so that it covers the depth of the Quickbar (e.g. United Kingdom looks fine)
  • Force one line of content
  • Make the Quickbar collapsed and only expand when reading clicks on it.

--Traveler100 (talk) 04:56, 13 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

I think your second option is too often overlooked. Most countries should have several paragraphs of information in the lede. Powers (talk) 19:44, 13 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Maybe we can force one line of content while we wait for the copy to catch up? --ButteBag (talk) 14:10, 15 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
I don't know of any way to do that programmatically. Powers (talk) 15:29, 15 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
We could add this CSS to the electricity and timezone outputs? overflow: hidden; height: 1.333em; display: block; --ButteBag (talk) 22:37, 16 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
I assume that would cut off the text at whatever arbitrary point was the end of the line? Powers (talk) 19:24, 17 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Exactly. No ellipsis, no fade, no nothing. --ButteBag (talk) 13:37, 18 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
That might work well for a specific article but there are other cases where it could be misleading. Powers (talk) 23:33, 18 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

Quickbar on regions and below country level

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Swept in from the pub

I appreciate that policy states { {quickbar} } is only for country level articles, but before I saw that I experimented with it on a UK county and found the result very useful. For Norfolk (England) the result was very good. I took a screen shot but every attempt to upload it failed so can't show it (and as it's not site policy I didn't save the page). But it showed a UK map with the county highlighted, basically showing where in the UK Norfolk was located - where we're talking about geographically. (To see what I mean, I just added { {quickbar} } immediately under the { {pagebanner ...} } line (without the spaces between the {. Is only using { {quickbar} } strict site policy or where is is useful and works well can it be used ? (Prompted to look at it by the topic above!) PsamatheM (talk) 19:57, 13 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

Placing a region in context of the country does have some merits, my main concern would be map image clutter. Simply placing at the top pushes the other maps too far down and looks too much (could however consider moving the static map with the main towns down to Get around section). Could also consider placing in Get in section. --Traveler100 (talk) 06:43, 14 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
I would agree that the Get In section seems the most appropriate. And I agree as you say (expressing it better than I did) "placing the region in context". PsamatheM (talk) 08:46, 14 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Have you looked at any of the other Wikivoyage languages, such as fr: and {{Info Ville}}? A quickbar-like info box on local or regional articles is quite common on some of the other projects. K7L (talk) 16:13, 14 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
PsamatheM, you could make a temporary user subpage which contains Norfolk with the quickbar. Everyone else will then be able to see how it looks without you having to save anything on mainspace. E.g. User:PsamatheM/Quickbar. I noticed that Traveler100 already tested it out but I guess this is something to consider next time. Thanks for trying this out. Gizza (roam) 22:59, 14 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
If you look at the Norfolk (England) History there is a version done by Traveler100 subsequently reverted or use link placing at the top (Traveller100's link/work/example). PsamatheM (talk) 23:04, 14 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Traditionally we assume that anyone reading a region-level article has previously read the article above it in the hierarchy and so already knows where the region is located within the higher-level area. (A good region map should show some context anyway.) Powers (talk) 01:01, 15 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Traditionally books worked that way but a search engine or a link from another page will place you in any level. --Traveler100 (talk) 02:14, 15 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
I'm more likely to follow the breadcrumbs trail 'backwards' (from a neighborhood to the large city where the neighborhood is located, then to the region where the city is located, and only maybe to the country). Perhaps other people do this as well, especially if the question is more like "Shall I go visit <relative>?" or "Since I have to go to <city> anyway, what else could I do while I'm in the area?" The country-first approach seems like it would work better for "Where in the world shall I go for a holiday this year?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:58, 15 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

Quickbar location

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Swept in from the pub

According to the Quickbar template, the Quickbar "should go at the top of the Understand section in every country article." Yesterday I moved the Quickbar in the South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands article to the Understand section, but this morning I find the edit has been reverted by user:ThunderingTyphoons!.

I checked several other articles, and it seems that the Quickbar is at the top of each article instead of in the Understand section. So are we ignoring the template requirements, has a change been made to the template and the change is not showing, or has something else happened? The last update to the Quickbar template was in June 2016. Zcarstvnz (talk) 08:01, 19 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

Hmm, that's odd. Is it perhaps a typo? The quickbars have never gone anywhere but alongside the lead for the whole time I've been on Wikivoyage. A quick look back on Template talk:Quickbar reveals that a move to the 'Understand' section has been proposed in the past, but never agreed upon, so in that case the information that you point out is written in the template is likely there in error. Thanks for raising this; now hopefully someone with more knowledge of the template's history can weigh in. --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 15:35, 19 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

Removal of Quickbars

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Swept in from the pub

Should the Template:Quickbar Quickbar template be removed from the following articles? These are mostly uninhabited islands that are not sovereign nations or are micronations where the Quickbar fields will never be completed. For instance Baker Island will never have a capital city, and since there are no cars, driving on the left or right hand side is superfluous. Other fields such as the currency, their population, what electrical plug-in type they use, etc. is essentially meaningless.

  • 1. Baker Island
  • 2. Coral Sea Islands
  • 3. Europa Island
  • 4. Glorioso Islands
  • 5. Howland Island
  • 6. Jarvis Island
  • 7. Johnston Atoll
  • 8. Juan de Nova Island
  • 9. Kanoya
  • 10. Midway Islands
  • 11. Navassa Island
  • 12. Palmyra Atoll
  • 13. Paracel Islands
  • 14. Spratly Islands
  • 15. Tromelin Island
  • 16. Liberland
  • 17. Republic of Molossia

Similarly, most of these locations do not have country codes (ISO 3166-1), or if they do, because they lack a capital city, and most of the other other information that is mentioned above, the Quickbar will never contain complete information. You can see the full list of articles missing Quickbar information at Category:Quickbar with missing information. Zcarstvnz (talk) 08:46, 19 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

Quickbar

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Swept in from the pub

d:Q14773 lists the emergency phone number for Macau as 999. That looks reasonable, but the {{quickbar}} on my cow here is displaying this as +1-999, which is nonsense. Same issue with United Kingdom, Emergencies +1-999, 112. Huh? Canada looks correct with 911. The template is supposedly pulling this data from Wikidata, so what went wrong? K7L (talk) 17:10, 6 May 2018 (UTC)Reply

I have just corrected the phone number field on d:Q3086706, which was showing +1-999. Changing it to 999 does result in a format "potential issue" warning. This looks to have fixed it for Macau and United Kingdom. It looks like the problem was caused by a bot edit in February. AlasdairW (talk) 22:15, 6 May 2018 (UTC)Reply
Thanks. It's not a good sign when one asks a very expensive computer "What's the number for 999?" and the machine gets it wrong. K7L (talk) 00:25, 7 May 2018 (UTC)Reply

Change to {{quickbar}}

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Swept in from the pub

Hi all,

Just a heads-up that I've modified Module:Quickbar to add some functionality. You can now specify a different Wikidata item to import certain values from. This is now in use at Corsica, and documented at Template:Quickbar/doc.

I was asked to make this change at Wikidata because I was adding missing values to autonomous entities that were the same as the values for the parent country, to fill in missing quickbar info, and the community was concerned about such data going out of date. I don't want to automatically import parent info, as was suggested there, because of cases like the US Virgin Islands, which had left-hand traffic missing for a long time until I added it.

That's it. Please let me know if there are any problems with this new functionality. I'll probably be adding it to more pages soon.

Does anyone know what the appropriate procedure would be to also getting this change deployed to other language editions, or at least of letting them know about it? be, hi, ps, and zh also use this, according to Wikidata. ARR8 (talk | contribs) 17:10, 22 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

@Traveler100: Is there a way we can modify the petscan queries at Category:Quickbar_with_missing_information to account for this? Otherwise, they won't be very useful. There's always the category solution, like last time, of course. ARR8 (talk | contribs) 03:49, 23 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

Historic currency shown

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When the quickbar was added to Åland, it showed both the current currency, the euro, and the historic, Finnish markka. I now changed it manually to just show the euro, but the template should be fixed to leave out historic information. For Finland just euro is shown, although markka is likewise present in its Wikidata item. I cannot see any difference that would explain the difference, but I suppose something is not working correctly. --LPfi (talk) 19:32, 27 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

It is due to the Rank setting of the Wikidata entry. In the currency property to the left of the currency name are 3 points, well up arrow, point, down arrow. I edited the Euro to Preferred Rank. Now the up arrow is filled in so is higher priority than the markka. --Traveler100 (talk) 20:21, 27 December 2018 (UTC)Reply
Good. I know about the mechanism, but haven't noticed where the ranks are stated. But why was just the euro showing in Finland (no problem, just curious). --LPfi (talk) 08:01, 28 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

Quickbar only showing one timezone

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I noticed the quickbar on United States of America appears to claim the entire country is in the UTC-6 time zone (which is Central Standard and Mountain Daylight). While this is arguably an improvement from showing all 10 possible timezones for the U.S. and its overseas territories, it's horribly misleading. I doubt this is a recent change, but is there a better solution short of overriding the Wikidata information to show just the range of time zones? Powers (talk) 13:38, 1 July 2020 (UTC)Reply

Population - how to get newest figures

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For Finland, the population figure was from 2016, although there are newer figures. It turned out the value for that year had higher rank. I changed it to normal rank, but now figures from 2014 are shown (the uppermost value – is that the value first entered?). I could of course change the rank for the latest figures to higher rank, but it seems clumsy to have to change back and forth every time new figures are added. Can't the template pick the most recent of the values with equal rank?

I suppose the problem is the same for all countries.

LPfi (talk) 13:45, 28 February 2022 (UTC)Reply
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