User talk:Moresby

Template:ValueDescription

Hi, as you have made those changes to Template:ValueDescription it might be a good idea to update the documentation Template:ValueDescription/doc as well.Thank you. Chrabros (talk) 10:43, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Absolutely - will do. Moresby (talk) 07:24, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Your new element icons

I've just noticed that you have replaced the element icons with slightly altered variants across the entire wiki. There are some license issues with it, as I explained here, but I also wonder: Why did you do it at all? --Tordanik 17:30, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

Good question. The element icons were a mixed bag of differing file types of different sizes and resolutions. Moving to a single set of clear, consistent SVG icons gives an opportunity to present a clear, consistent branding across the whole project, and do so in a way which can be used in high quality at different sizes and in different contexts. I've taken some time to identify the key aspects of each existing element icon, and keep these, so the overall look is very familiar. I've put the current items on this page, and intend, in time, to add instructions on how to generate others in the same theme.

Looking into the various templates which use the icons, there is a real mishmash of different approaches, particularly complicated by different language support. As a result, pulling these together so that changes can be made more easily across the whole project is taking some time, and is resulting in a number of changes which look small, but together make things much easier for the future.

Your point about licensing is interesting: I hadn't thought that this would be an issue. For the absolute avoidance of doubt, I will label the images as public domain, which should address that particular problem. Thanks for taking the time and trouble to point this out - I really appreciate your effort. :-) Moresby (talk) 18:23, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your willingness to resolve the license issue so quickly!

I'm not really convinced about the necessity to create a new set of icons, though. Unless I'm missing something, all the icons used e.g. in the ValueDescription template existed as SVG with a consistent look already. In some places, PNG versions were still being used, but that could have been solved by replacing them with the already existing SVG counterparts. So to me it looks as if what you did was moving away from a single set of SVG icons towards two sets of SVG icons... --Tordanik 21:31, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

Oh, one more thing: I would not even have noticed your new icons if you didn't exchange the "inactive" icons in the Key/ValueDescription boxes with bright red strike-through icons. I doubt this is a good design decision, these really stand out from the blue-green info box. There's no reason to attract attention to those icons with a "warning" color, it's totally normal that a tag cannot be used on some element types. So if you switched back to the pale inactive icons for that use case, I would be a lot more happy with your changes. --Tordanik 16:45, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

I agree, the colour of the icons could be more subtle and in-sync with the rest of the box. Chrabros (talk) 04:43, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

OK, I'll have another go at styling it. But let me take you through the reasons that I got where it is now. What initially kicked this off in the first place was that I thought that the distinction between the "not on this tag" and the "no information provided" icons was a little unclear - they were both "greyed-out" versions of the main icons, but one had a grey question mark. I thought about what the key audience and message was for these icons: people who want to tag an element, and want to check that the tag which they think they might apply is sensibe. From this point of view, the answers "yes, it's suitable" and "no, it's not suitable" are both key outcomes, and I wanted to make sure these were easily visible at a glance. The "use on this tag" seemed distinct enough, but the "not on this tag" didn't seem to be making the same impression. And that's important, as what it's saying essentially is "you can tag this type of element, but it's not going to have any effect, and you'll be wasting your time."

I started by trying to keep the colour palate very similar, and put a black diagonal line across, based on the red lines in the international convention for roadsigns. The problem with that was that it was still not terribly easy to see at a glance, as the black line was not that distinct from the rest of the image, and it started to look a little confusing. The art of information design is to get messages across as simply and clearly as possible, so I looked into putting something in which contrasted clearly with the images, and ended up with the red border and stripe. It's interesting to note that Tordanik spotted these - demonstrating that they do stand out and catch the eye.

But the question then is are they too eye-catching and distracting? I guess we have to think about whether what we want is a clear representation of information, or a tasteful, artistic impression of the data: there's probably a middle path here. I'll have another go at redesigning those icons to see whether they can be more in keeping with the others and the context, but without losing their impact. Watch this space. :-) Moresby (talk) 08:48, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

You have to keep in mind that many people who are on a key/value documentation page don't go there for the element icons, so while the icons should be clear to people who look at them, they should not jump at someone interested only in the text. If you want to emphasize the distinction between "undefined" and "no", I think it would make more sense to make the "undefined" version stand out more instead, because it signals that the page needs work. --Tordanik 16:34, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

I have noticed that you have created an icon for "deprecated" key-value combinations. Please note that the term "deprecated" is not universally liked here because it often creates the idea that just because a small group voted to use another tag instead of an established one, the established one should not not be used any more (which is, at least in this general form, wrong), or even worse, the established tag should be automatically exchanged with something new. Please keep that in mind if you actually use these icons anywhere. --Frederik Ramm (talk) 22:41, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks - that's useful background. I picked the word "deprecated" without appreciating that it has this connotation, and I certainly didn't have an agenda with this. I'll try to find another word to use instead which comes with less baggage. Moresby (talk) 22:49, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

KeyDescription template

Please see Template talk:KeyDescription#Website and URL pattern, where I cold do with some help. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 13:44, 1 April 2014 (UTC).

New proposed KeyDescription Template

This discussion was moved to Template talk:Description.

Problem(s)

This discussion was moved to Template talk:Description.

Thank you for doing this

This discussion was moved to Template talk:Description.

Category:User documentation pages

What was idea behind this category? I find hard time to find place for it in Category:Wiki right now. Category:Documentation not an option, this is really old cat with outdated structure (See Category:Categories) Xxzme (talk) 05:47, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Interesting question. I've had a look and here is what happens. The {{Documentation}} template is used widely for documenting templates. It's helpful because it allows the documentation for the template to go into a different page, which keeps it separate from the template code itself, but that documentation is displayed nicely on the template page itself by inclusion. When you first use {{Documentation}} in a template, and the documentation page has not yet been created, you get a "[create]" link on the template page, which allows you easily to create the new documentation page for that template. (You can see this by creating a new page with just {{Documentation}} in it.)

When you click on the "[create]" link to create the documentation, the new documentation page appears in the editor, with some basic content automatically present, giving an outline of how documentation might be written. This content comes from the Template:Documentation/preload page. This page includes the text {{Documentation subpage}} , which means that many documentation subpages include that template. It is the {{Documentation subpage}} template which includes code which puts documentation pages into categories: documentation pages in the user namespace get automatically added to the Category:User documentation pages category. The code which does this was added in March 2013 by User:TheDJ, although that account made only two edits, and now is not registered.

So this is how pages end up in that category, rather than editors choosing individually to add pages. I can't tell what was in TheDJ's mind when he added this functionality, but it does seem to have some sense: documentation pages tend to be present mostly for templates, so a page which is intended as documentation which is in another namespace may be useful to indicate something different. In my case, it was because I was doing a lot of work on some complicated templates which I did in my userspace until I was sure they were correct and had been agreed by the community. I'm not experienced in arranging categories, but a subcategory of Category:Documentation would seem to me to be very sensible. Moresby (talk) 08:03, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Template support for namespaces

Hi, there has been talk about better support for namespaces, particularly something like {{PrefixNamespaceDescription}} and {{PostfixNamespaceDescription}} in analogy to {{KeyDescription}}. See eg. User_talk:Jgpacker#Namespace template? and Talk:Key:disused#Rename to "key:disused:" ?. Do you have an opinion on that? RicoZ (talk) 12:59, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

"User:Moresby/KeyDescription and User:Moresby/ValueDescription are reimplementations of the various"

Do you have any idea why public https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Template_talk:Description starts this way? Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 01:38, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Back in 2014 I was frustrated by the many different key and value description templates, many of which seemed very slightly different from each other, with slightly different features, in some cases slightly broken. I was sure that a major overhaul could really improve functionality and maintainability. Because it was such a big job, I didn't want to jump in and change the existing templates, so I put together a set of self-consistent replacement templates in my user space. The text you point out was from quite early on, and was part of describing what I had done and making the case for change. You can see much of the discussion on that documentation page. After some time there was sufficient consensus to replace the existing templates with my new ones, and I moved the templates out of my namespace into the main namespace. I'm pretty sure that the text you mention is old text which referred to where the templates were when I was creating them, but wasn't updated when they were finally moved into the main namespace. Sorry for the oversight. Feel free to improve it, and thanks for the spot! Moresby (talk) 17:49, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, I removed this text Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 20:20, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Migration to new Key & Value description templates

Hi, I'm not sure if you saw, I have moved all description templates to use our new data items system. See OpenStreetMap:Wikibase. I will be moving some leftover pages that still use your custom one, e.g. {{Template:RU:ValueDescription}}. --Yurik (talk) 00:21, 8 December 2018 (UTC)