Template talk:q

“black box” term-marking code
Removed in these revisions.

  &lt;/nowiki>  

†  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 23:17, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Template talk:q
Nominated for deletion (the Template:q). I'm not all that sure why. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:33, 18 January 2010 (UTC)


 * delete directly violates WT:QUOTE, which says that the words being quoted should be bolded. Also it uses a horrible background color. -- Prince Kassad 12:26, 18 January 2010 (UTC)


 * It should be orphaned in the mainspace, since, as PK notes, such use is in violation of policy. But it's used in discussions of whether to change that policy to use something like { {q} }, and should be kept as long as such discussions are recent (which they are, for now). &#x200b;— msh210 ℠ 15:59, 18 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Ya, delete, Mglovesfun (talk) 16:07, 18 January 2010 (UTC)


 * See Beer_parlour_archive/2009/September. I think it's being actively used (ie the policy page is out of date). Should wait for User:Doremítzwr to opine. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 16:34, 18 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the heads-up, Bequw. I’m too busy at the moment to reply fully; I shall do so in a few hours’ time. In the meantime, consider experimenting with ’s colour scheme to find something visible yet palatable — I’ve changed it to Naples yellow ; let me know what you all think. †  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 17:33, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

My reply took a little longer that I thought it would; here it is now. Conrad.Irwin has implemented a solution wherewith I hope we shall all be happy — highlighting the cited term with a thin black box ; thereby doing away with all considerations of colour. (Formerly, there was a problem with this solution, in that it interrupted letters’ ascenders and descenders, but that now seems to have been solved.) Anyone looking for a rationale for the use of in place of normal emboldenment with  word  should read Beer parlour archive/2009/September; if there are any points that have not been addressed in that discussion, please raise them in this one. Bequw is right — this template still sees active use; and not just by me — it was added by other contributors in, , Citations:Peanuts:, , , , , , , Citations:ylem:, , , and. For the reasons given in the above-linked discussion, I believe our standard for term-highlighting should be by using or somesuch; I should be glad to see policy updated in line therewith. †  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 20:33, 19 January 2010 (UTC)


 * I don't particularly favor the use of this template, though I certainly favor a box over any of the apparently restricted range of colors of assured visibility. I see no compelling reason to allow, let alone encourage, let alone require this format. I would just as soon see it deleted. DCDuring TALK 21:10, 19 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep. What if we say that usage of this template is encouraged only when the quoted text already contains emboldened terms? --Bequw → ¢ • τ 21:41, 19 January 2010 (UTC)


 * I don't really see it as necessary even in such cases as bolding virtually never has a bearing on the meaning or use of the headword involved. In any event, I have seen no instances in which it does. DCDuring TALK 22:45, 19 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Please read (or re-read) Beer parlour archive/2009/September; a number of your points heretofore are addressed therein. Emboldenment marks emphasis or (less often) makes the use–mention distinction, just like italicisation; the former may be discouraged in favour of the latter for formal works like normal books, but it is far more common in informal media such as comics and discussion fora (the ones that allow such formatting, in any case). The example I have used before is the Introducing… series — specifically Introducing Foucault; regarding that, this post I wrote last September explains the situation: “Introducing Foucault is touted as ‘The international bestseller’ on its front cover. The entire Introducing… series is very popular and comprises a large and growing number of titles, all of which (in my experience, going on the ones on Marx, Postmodernism, Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Semiotics, and Nietzsche) make liberal use of emboldenment. ‘[E]mboldenings in the source’ may very well be an exception, but they certainly aren’t a negligible exception.” In last September’s Beer-Parlour discussion, you’ll find links to a number of entries wherein I’ve quoted Introducing Foucault, for a number of which conflating emboldened-in-the-source terms with our highlighted terms obscures the intending meaning somewhat. †  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 04:47, 21 January 2010 (UTC)


 * DCDuring, what alternative solution do you suggest for dealing with the two problems I raised at the beginning of the linked-to discussion? You said yourself that you’re “not especially in love with bold”, and since neither “a lesser emboldenment” is available nor is a colour-highlighted background desirable, what is left to us? (Those boxes are certainly less distracting than the emboldenment.) As for Bequw’s proposal that ’s be restricted to already-emboldened terms only: that still leaves unsolved the first problem I raised in the discussion; moreover, it introduces inconsistent presentation into the standard and would be a convention difficult to infer due to the infrequency of emboldenment in cited texts, neither of which are desirable, in my opinion. †  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 22:23, 19 January 2010 (UTC)


 * To me the problems seem vanishly rare and inconsequential. We seem to be encouraging a hair on the tail to wag the dog. For the number of instances in which it occurs we could use square brackets to note the text instance and footnotes to note any typographical irregularity that a contributor cannot conveniently reproduce (not just the case at hand, but any irregularity). In addition, we have such options as showing a page image or a link to a page image. DCDuring TALK 22:45, 19 January 2010 (UTC)


 * They are not vanishingly rare, as (I believe) I’ve demonstrated. The consequence of this problem is inaccurate reproduction of texts; whether you think that matters is a different question. By your alternative solution, do you mean using   or somesuch to mark these irreproducibles, with a link to a Notes section later in the entry? We often do have the ability to link to page images, especially when the quoted text (as it often does) was taken from Google Book Search; however, that is certain not something we can assume, and it is in reality not the case with the quotations I took from Introducing Foucault. †  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 04:47, 21 January 2010 (UTC)


 * I cannot find such attempted let alone actual demonstration. It is very easy to discriminate between texts and typography. We have texts to document use of words, not to be venerated. Typography probably merits its own WMF project (Wiktypography ?), like Wikispecies and Wikigazetteer. We can all be grateful that Google makes it possible to access scanned images of pages with archaic and obsolete typography, thereby eliminating the need for redundant inclusion of possibly inauthentic or at least clumsy attempts to simulate the originals.
 * The use of the special typography seems warranted only if some conditions are met, which, taken together, four-at-a-time, or three-at-a-time have not arisen in my experience.
 * a given text displays the headword in bold,
 * that given text is essential to attestation of a sense of the headword,
 * the precise typography is essential to understanding the meaning of the word in use,
 * no scanned image of the page is available, and
 * there is no wording of a note to explain the way in which the bolding changes the meaning.
 * -- DCDuring TALK 15:33, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete. This dictionary, like all respectable reference works, should be consistent in its basic formatting conventions.  Bolding the headwords gets the job done just fine.  A melange of styles is not helpful and makes Wiktionary look amateurish.  I note that this template has now been applied in many entries.  They should all be robo-fixed. -- WikiPedant 00:16, 21 January 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree with the need for consistency. (Hence my disagreement with the proposal that be used for already-emboldened terms only; see my post hereinbefore, timestamped 22:23, 19 January 2010.) I disagree that “emboldening the headwords gets the job done just fine”, for the many reasons I have already given. I protest that we should not bot-remove the transcluded instances of  that presently exist, at least not until the resolution of these discussions; in the meantime, however, we can alter  to embolden the terms it envelops, so that the visual result is the same, thereby masking inconsistency of coding behind consistency of display. †  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 04:47, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
 * That seems like a good compromise. Can we agree on that? Having { {q|foo}} equal foo and Requests for deletion/Others equal  for now, since there is still some propounding of { {q} }? &#x200b;— msh210 ℠ 16:34, 21 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Oh, I guess I'm OK with that. Meanwhile, I find myself wondering whether fancy stuff like the box outlining works OK in every browser (old and new versions) that's out there (especially in oddball situations, such as where a multi-word highlighted term splits to display on two lines)?  Remember, lots of our users are out there in the developing world using older systems. -- WikiPedant 18:07, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
 * The box will not work brilliantly split over two lines (you'll get line break), this can be fixed for all browsers since IE5.5 by forcing them not to break inside the box (though this will be ugly for very long terms as the line lengths will be wierd). Make the template contain   instead of   or mediawiki will see ' word ' in the cases where the term inside the box is bolded. Conrad.Irwin 18:14, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't have time to refer to the prior discussion of this template that Doremitzvr refers to but honestly regardless of that I think it should be kept. 50 Xylophone Players talk 19:58, 22 January 2010 (UTC)


 * (The best solution would be to stop bolding headwords in citations altogether. I think it looks patronising. But that's a whole nother debate.) < class="latinx">Ƿidsiþ 20:24, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

I've encountered bold text in quotations once or twice, easily handled with a note in brackets like [boldface sic]. Bold text is very rare in good typesetting, practically absent from running text.

If the entire quotation is a title or heading, then we shouldn't be reproducing any stylistic boldface anyway. I've found it useful to note the nature of such text like [heading], [footnote], etc.

If there really is meaningful boldface in the source text, then the correct way to mark it up would be as an HTML strong element, which conveys its meaning. Our own highlighting of a term would use a semantically-neutral b element (or an HTML5 mark), and provided with contrasting visual formatting via CSS (could look <b style="color:#822">coloured</b>, <b style="background:#ffa;font-weight:normal;">highlighted</b>, set in a contrasting <b style="font-family:georgia,serif;">font face</b>, <b style="border-bottom:2px dotted #9c9;font-weight:normal">underlined</b>, or whatever). This way, our boldfacing would reflect the semantics of our quoted text, and also be accessible in both visual browsers and with assistive technologies (e.g. screen readers for the blind).

Too bad Wikitext marks up triple apostrophes as &lt;b>...&lt;/b>. We'd have to manually &lt;strong> the source bolding – much too picky for routine editing, when it comes up so rarely.

The use of empty is very bad practice. Then when I view the source wikitext the most important word or phrase is omitted. The wikitext breaks silently and permanently if I copy it anywhere else. Doesn't this break Mediawiki's search? —Michael Z. 2010-04-12 17:46 z 


 * I'd say delete for those reasons, but unless there's a rush of delete comments, this is an overall pass. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:55, 28 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete per WikiPedant. As an open and free dictionary, our highest priority needs to be keeping our data genuinely open and free, which means portable, which means consistent.  A melange of formatting techniques which serve no purpose other than prettying up this transitory website does long-term  harm that outweighs the short-term good. -- Visviva 15:44, 29 May 2010 (UTC)


 * I am in favour of deleting this iff we stop emboldening the pagename. (Something I have also decided I am in favour of). Conrad.Irwin 20:32, 29 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete. --Yair rand (talk) 06:52, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

@ Visviva: WikiPedant's objection was due to the then-current use of the black outline in place of emboldenment as default. Now, all users see the current standard emboldenment unless they have the -related pref box-ticked. Once that change was made, he said that "[he] guess[es he's] OK with that". As for the rest of your objection, what I understand of it is, AFAICT, addressed by my response to Michael Z.

@ Michael Z.: I've taken on board your very valid criticism in your fifth paragraph (in your post timestamped: 2010-04-12 17:46); see User talk:AutoFormat for the proposed solution, which prevents wikitext-breaking but keeps 's labour-saving benefits.

@ Conrad.Irwin: We would not be able to "stop emboldening the pagename" without a great deal of inconsistency of presentation in the interim unless we made use of a template like. If all our quotations used, we'd be able to change default presentation with complete consistency at the flick of a switch; alternative presentation could be opted for viâ WT:PREFS — whether no emboldenment becomes the default or not, accommodates it and every other presentation method.

Most of the other points made have, AFAICT, already been addressed earlier on in this discussion, or in Beer parlour archive/2009/September. I still, of course, maintain that we keep this template. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 10:30, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

fails. Needs to be orphaned. -- Prince Kassad 13:18, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
 * deleted -- Prince Kassad 17:58, 5 January 2011 (UTC)