Template talk:WikiProject Category Suppression

Query concerning Template:WPCATSUP

Conversation moved from Willscrlt's talk page:

Hi, I've just stumbled across this banner and wanted to query the use of quality and importance assessments. At face value, these don't appear to be terribly useful to a project that won't be dealing with mainspace article content. PC78 (talk) 10:26, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Hi. Thanks for asking first rather than nominating for deletion or something like that. :-) Your questions probably would have been answered if I had gotten around to typing up the docs for the template. However, due to changes in some related templates and category suppression in general (see WT:CATSUP and Template talk:Cat handler for the ongoing discussions), I waited for those issues to settle down before finalizing the template and documenting it. That's also why almost no templates have been tagged yet. It's all in a sort of "holding pattern" for a bit longer.

• quality assessment is not used by the WikiProject for "grading" the templates. Qualities like 'GA', 'FA', etc. are ignored and collected into a single custom rating of 'article' (though an article probably should never be tagged with this template). We do use the more uncommon classes like 'template' (the most important one!), 'category', 'redirect', etc., but they are not critical.
• 'importance' and the two custom attributes, 'catsup' and 'method' are very important. The WikiProject will be working to help bring automatic categorization and suppression of it to many more templates than currently support it.
  • The importance tag will be used to help prioritize which templates would benefit from the additional capabilities first (i.e., which templates editors should focus on and in what order).
  • The catsup parameter is used to indicate if category suppression is used, needed, or should never be added.
  • The method identifies the method of categorizaton and/or suppression that is used by the template. Since there are several different methods currently in use, it helps to see at a glance the method a template uses. Yes, that should be documented in the template docs, too, but it isn't always. Additionally, as categorization and suppression methods are changed or enhanced, it will be good to be able to locate templates that use the different features, and thus need an "upgrade".

I am not aware of any other method of identifying templates in such a manner, or that has as much widespread community support, than as a WikiProject (appropriate given that multiple people are working on different parts of this issue and need to coordinate activities) and using a WP banner to handle the categorization (without polluting the template itself with extra categories). Do you have any other suggestions? —Willscrlt ( “Talk” ) 19:18, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

I do/did, but I see the /class subtemplate has been changed since I made my initial query. I'll come back to this a bit later. PC78 (talk) 19:32, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I think you can use namespace detection alone to determine the class, like another non-content banner uses (Template:WPAFC-admin). I've updated your class mask with my suggestion. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 19:33, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

I think you're good with the changes made by Martin. From what I've seen of the project, a lot of the classes you had in there didn't look like they would realistically be used—I'm not even sure why you'd need to tag files, but I'll leave it—and you can always add anything you do need later, as and when you need it. What I will do is remove Article-Class; there's no such thing, and for the sake of a project which won't need to tag articles it's not worth setting it up. As it stands now, any pages not in the Category/File/Template/User/Wikipedia namespace will default to NA-Class. PC78 (talk) 23:47, 22 November 2009 (UTC)