Template talk:Stub

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Multilingual version

Prehistory: Yesterday, SomeHuman had created a rudimentary page Graz, Austria, as there had already been a WNBR. In the style of other wikis, he flagged it by straight html and css within the article as a stub, in English and in German - the language in Austria that was used by the contributors for the Vienna (Wien) article.
Nsayers quickly reacted by creating:

  • The Template:Stub (Thus simply putting {{Stub}} in an article makes it show the Stub box.)
  • The Category:Stubs (An article with {{Stub}} in it, is automatically assigned to the category by the template.)

As this template is not intended to serve (apart from this wiki's main language) only for German, Nsayers kept only the (simplified) English phrase visible and hid the German phrase that he had copied from 'Graz'. Apparently for SomeHuman, he wrote the template comment: "Leave translations until we have a few more..."

Nick, you simplified my English version (and had forgotten 'is', I just inserted that word). I adapted the one phrase in German accordingly, and now added a few more. For now, I only activated seven languages (Graz must have at least German). Apart from English that should always be shown at top, the phrases appear in alphabetical order of their preceding 2-character language indicators. When more articles go in your new category Stubs, or in case I would get e.g. Scandinavian phrases [though no more Finnish than Magyar or Japanese], it certainly needs another approach:
It would be best to allow passing an argument or an arguments list to the template that could make the latter show the appropriate 2 or 3 languages [English as default and always present, one or two more when selected by arguments], but I'm not sure about this wiki's capacity for decision making programming techniques. Is there already any kind of If ... Then ... (see commented pseudo code) anywhere on this wiki, or who might know, or who might install or activate the necessary (e.g. parser functions as on Wikipedia)?

I would leave my 'comment' line wraps and true comment lines in the template: they serve mainly three purposes:

  • For each language, clearly show which parts correspond (facilitating later additional languages or corrections);
  • Demonstrate which html tags belong where in an argument driven template as I hope we can get;
  • Show anyone wishing to modify the template [thinking to 'improve' or 'simplify' it], which less obvious things to keep in mind.

Alternatively, you might create a Template Doc showing that informative structure and the notification. For the time being, I would leave the template as large as it is: it will help to quickly get the desired help in improving an article so as to lose its Stub status (provided anyone reads it at all, of course).
SomeHuman 2010-01-20 18:57 (GMT)