Template talk:Navbox county1-en

These are getting used
People looking for info are finding these county boxes and putting their queries in. Excellent concept, Phlox, and pretty durn good execution! I've used some "br" tags to shorten some of the lines (in this one and the UK one) so that people suffer little or no horizontal scrolling need. My only remaining quibble is that the "people" line sends readers to categories, where we really don't want visitors filling the screen with paragraphs of material so that subcategories and articles are pushed down out of sight. Solutions may be in the next paragraph. Robin Patterson 15:46, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Categories (the "People" line)
This is the most likely one for enquirers to choose because it says it is about people. Most of the target categories haven't been created yet, so when someone clicks and reaches one of them and adds a message or fact, the category is a bit of an orphan, because it has no subcategories, articles, or media and no parent category (and probably no outward links).

I would like to have one of our flagged bots run over the nearly 15,000 U.S. boxes and do the following:
 * 1) IF category has no parent category,
 * 2) THEN give it at least two. They will differ textually depending on whether you are in births, deaths, marriages, or residents, but will probably be obvious enough to the human operator - recent page Category:Born in Custer County, Oklahoma has examples.
 * 3) THEN add something right at the top of the category page. This will vary as above, but in each case will probably start with Template:AlsoWP (subject to our checking whether WP really has equivalents) then have Template:Catmore with additional wording that refers to the proposed "main" article page and encourages readers to write on that (instead of on the category page) and to categorise it. (The really clued-up readers may realise that we would prefer them to create and categorise a separate page for each individual mentioned, but that's too much to ask casual enquirers to handle.)
 * 4) BUT IF (as will rarely be the case) it has at least one category, it has probably been created by someone who knows a bit about what it should have, and may already have Template:Catmore or a similar link to an article or just a list of obvious articles that the casual enquirer should be able to light on;
 * 5) THEN give it the categories determined as above (deleting exact duplicates if any) but otherwise leave it alone,
 * 6) AND put it in a new temporary Category:US county-related categories for checking for manual checking by those of us who feel like patrolling for imperfections and will be led to these from Category:Wikia maintenance).

I've done a couple in the last few days and will happily join a discussion of detail on the bot talk page or similar page.

Robin Patterson 15:46, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Subpages (the other three lines)
These are easier to handle. Anybody can write anything on them, basically, without upsetting the wiki's structure and functionality. Enquiries would be better on "talk" pages, but any content on those 130,000 pages will be welcome until they start filling.

But each of them wants categories too, just as the new target categories mentioned above do. Because each is a subpage, it has a prominent link to its county page (and the downward link in the box where we started), which a conservative user may think is enough linkage, but it would be more obvious and more easily found if it were specifically in its county's category - one fewer step for searchers browsing down the category tree from country or state.

So I would like them pre-created and categorised in the same sort of way as I want for the categories under the previous heading.

I wonder whether we want the template added to them too. I saw it on a census subpage and thought that it could look a little odd because its title is the subpage title, which just doesn't relate to some of those boxes - and of course we would be adding over five million initially "dead" links (140,000 already, times nearly 40 if each subpage has a set of boxed links) for the U.S. alone. So don't, eh? The category links should take readers easily back to related existing or potential pages with fairly sensible names that should be adequate for people to write what they want.

As above, I'll very happily join in a discussion with anybody willing to do the bot work or at least to tell me how difficult it might be.

Robin Patterson 15:46, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Non-existent parent categories
Most of the parent categories referenced by the above process do not, apparently, exist yet. See Category:Born in Custer County, Oklahoma for a recent example. Not even the county category (which should have the county page as its "star" component). That can be dealt with by later bot runs (possibly copying from Wikipedia) and should be discussed on more relevant pages such as Forum:Model state pages. "Tomorrow" or the next day! Robin Patterson 15:46, 5 July 2008 (UTC)