Template talk:Basketball

Moving over rfd discussion:

Template:Basketball

It seems odd to have a template for this. Dmh created it though, so maybe it is useful for a reason I cannot grasp. Polyglot 10:10, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the benefit of the doubt :->

This was an experiment aimed at speeding the adoption of categories, and I think a pretty successful one. The basic idea is simple. Instead of saying (law) or (medicine) or (basketball) for a specialized sense of a term, you say {{law}}, {{medicine}} or {{basketball}}. This puts in both the visible tag and the category, e.g., [[Category:law]],[[Category:medicine]] or [[Category:Basketball]]. Using this, I was quickly able to add several dozen terms to Category:Basketball, and going forward, I just have to say {{hoops}} instead of (''basketball'')[[Category:Basketball]].

Further, if we decide to rename the category or change the tag, we can just edit the template. In short, we gain the usual two benefits of templates: concison and indirection.

One main driver is to replace the current "Index by topic", which is a mess to look at, a pain to maintain and evidently largely ignored, with categories, allowing the Wikimedia engine to do the grunt work of maintaining and formatting the list. It's much easier simply to tag an entry with a category than to manually update a separate page.

We've had quite a bit of success already with categories in administration. Notably, requests for delection and cleanup are now largely category-driven. This means, for example, I can go to the cleanup category, follow the link, edit the artcle and have the system automatically track my work.

Strictly speaking, it might seem more consistent to have named the template {{basketball}}, but one of the advantages of templates is that you can have them expand to whatever you want. "Hoops" is less typing and immediately understandable to a hoops fan (and, to be honest, I was in a whimsical mood). Note that there is no reason we couldn't also have {{basketball}}. The cleanest approach would have been to define {{basketball}} first, and then just have {{hoops}} expand to {{basketball}}. We could still do this (and in fact, I've done it -dmh). Similarly {{footie}} might expand to {{football}} and {{pigskin}} might expand to {{american_football}}, or whatever. In other words, consider {{hoops}} an alias for {{basketball}}, which I didn't bother to create. Going forward, I think it would be best practice always to define the literal name, and then define aliases in terms of it.

While we're at it, {{basketball}} might better expand to {{tagandcategory|basketball}} and so forth (this is done, to, but I called it cattag). There's certainly room for improvement. It would also be good to be able to handle multiple tags I now have as (''basketball, colloquial'')[[Category:Basketball]] (see points in the paint for example). Ideally, I'd want to do this as {{hoops}}{{colloquial}}, which would also add [[Category:Colloquial]], but then the actual entry would look like

1. (basketball)(colloquial) Points scored ...

I personally don't mind this, especially given the benefit of categories, but others might. Another option would be to have {{hoops|colloquial}} expand to (''basketball, colloquial'')[[Category:basketball]][[Category:colloquial]], but I'm not sure if that would break plain unadorned {{hoops}}. I'd have to look at the template mechanism in more detail, but there are probably technical solutions available. (see Template:cattag2, which seems to work OK. There is also cattag3, and it's dead easy to define more -dmh)

In any case, please don't gun Template:Hoops. It's already used in dozens of entries, and I think it's helping. Even if it isn't, I don't think it's hurting greatly. -dmh 17:00, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)