Roggenwolf

Transcluding templates in unlinked articles

Hi Biohistorian15,

Thankyou for your email. I have started a discussion on the Talk page of Conservatism US as I am not unsympathetic to your suggestion, but there need to be clear guidelines. It is patently inappropriate to transclude Conservatism US in articles such as Libertarianism in the United States, which already transcludes Template:Libertarianism US and is not "part of a series on Conservatism in the US"!

I think it is important here to split out the topic of Conservatism with that of the US Republican Party. For instance, the presidential campaign of Vivek Ramaswarmy is not relevant to "Conservatism". No political philosopher is going to be writing a book about Vivek's campaign in 20 years time - it did not propose any radical new interpretation of Conservatism or have an enduring impact on the subject. The article is not about conservatism - it's about a political campaign by a conservative and is adequately covered by templates such as Template:2024 United States presidential election. Likewise, many GOP subjects are happily gathered in Template:Republican Party (United States) but do not really concern the political system or ideology of Conservatism in the manner of Adams, Eliot or Schlafly.

All the best. Hemmers (talk) 11:31, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

Ok, you clearly care more about this than I do, haha. Seems reasonable enough. Regards, Biohistorian15 (talk) 15:48, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

@Hemmers. I've now read your rather expansive argument one more time and you're probably right about this after all. There are other templates that are massively overused with even more problematic (e.g. at times POV) implications though; e.g. the Template:Discrimination sidebar or Template:Antisemitism sidebar. Should these be next in line? If so, might I ask which Xtool you're using to find these outliers? Biohistorian15 (talk) 16:50, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

Thankyou for your thoughts. Yes, if Discrimination and Antisemitism are heavily overused then they should be slimmed back. However, both of them are smaller than Conservatism US is - despite covering international/"general" topics - so maybe "glass houses" and all that! My main criticism of them would be excessively large groups.

By contrast, Conservatism US now has a lot of sub-sections, possibly to the point that a user would struggle (for instance) to understand what the most relevant or influential media outlets are in the US (of the 70+ listed!). If you were someone interested in learning about Conservative news outlets, where do you go next - Breitbart, Dallas Morning News, American Spectator, Fox? Breaking them down into Newspapers/Journals/TV takes away the sting of a wall of links... but obscures the fact that it doesn't really direct the user usefully or tell you where to go next. So what's the point of it? If people want to trudge through a minutely comprehensive list of links, then categories and lists work well for this.

I would note that overnight, the Conservatism US template has been added to an additional 88(!) articles, on top of >80 last week. Can it really be said that this is a web of highly relevant core articles? If it gets too full, it ceases to be useful.

On the topic of tooling, I'm not using any specific Xtools. I have a few python scripts running locally which tell me about new articles in certain areas, look for a couple of highly specific forms of potential vandalism and also tell me about new inbound links to certain articles of interest. Because some of those articles are linked in Conservatism US, I get notified every time the template is transcluded in a new page! Hemmers (talk) 10:15, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

Ok, thanks for telling me. I am, in fact, almost done with transcluding the template as I finished going through the last section yesterday. Roggenwolf (talk) 11:11, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

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