Talk:Alumni Oxonienses: the Members of the University of Oxford, 1715-1886

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Where parts of works are linked from Author pages, utilise {{Oxon link}}. -- billinghurst (talk) 07:58, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Rev.?

I'm thinking that omitting Rev. in the article title would be a good idea. It is not consistently used for clerics. Charles Matthews (talk) 09:12, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

For the work, I have been putting the name in as it shows in the work (WYSIWYG). It has just been easier, and often the best disambiguator. Otherwise you then have to go into counts "Smith, John (1)", " ... (2)", which we also do. It is the approach with numbers of works where we don't have dates of life, eg. Men-at-the-Bar. — billinghurst sDrewth 09:39, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

From the point of view of discoverability of what is here ... one would look for something else. Big discussion, that can be short-circuited if one believes the answer lies in Wikidata items pointing here. Charles Matthews (talk) 05:25, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

I truly believe that these should (all) be wikidata'd, whereas I see that the issue is how to do these well and conveniently, currently tools are butt ugly for doing these well. In regard to discoverability, I believe that that article find will be by a full search, as the typeahead function simply will not function. Until we have a search that starts at a forward slash, ie. treats it as a starting point, we otherwise neutered. — billinghurst sDrewth 09:19, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

Moving to dynamic layouts

Doing this here so there's an easily findable record of the conversation and let others chime in, but I think this is mainly Billinghurst's area of expertise (and CC to Charles Matthews to keep them in the loop).

Billinghurst: do I understand correctly that you were running the bot over these entries, converting them from plain {{header}} + body content to using {{oxon}} that does the whole entry? And is that still the plan (I know you're busy, not nagging ;)) or was the approach dropped for some reason?

The reason I'm asking is that the entries (both the header-based and the oxon-based ones) are currently using the global CSS class leftoutdent for formatting. This class, for technical reasons, needs to go away, so we'll need an alternative way to format the entries. For the (extremely few) uses that were not Alumni Oxonienses entries, I converted them to use dynamic layouts with a suggested default layout of Layout 2 as that seemed most similar to the intent of the leftoutdent class (a left margin, limited width, etc.). But how specifically we do it isn't of primary concern to me, and there's a couple of other options we could look at if the dynamic layouts route doesn't suit.

I had initially planned to just run a bot over the entries removing the leftoutdent code, inserting a {{default layout}}, and converting the #tag:pages syntax while I was at it. But if the selected approach is really to convert everything from {{header}} to {{oxon}}, then perhaps the better approach is to finish that conversion and then we can update the formatting code all in one place (in {{oxon}})?

I am happy to help with any necessary bot work, but I think that {{header}} → {{oxon}} conversion probably takes some experience, iterative improvement of the bot script, and familiarity with the Alumni Oxonienses that I lack. Xover (talk) 07:08, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

The style was purposeful as there are some works that it does replicate, plus with these biographical works, their standard from display hid the names of the biographical and in the end allowed a neater presentation with something more overt and for short biographical entries, so pushing back to default layout is not desired. So I would suggest that a simple removal of the class for unspecified technical reasons without finding a replicate solution is not desirable. So we can probably do a block center and max-width elsewhere (still needed) and lose the margin-left as it is old code that was for used prior and I cannot remember it original use case, though it was manually transcribed works. Also to note that there is plentiful uses of that class outside of AO works

And yes, the plan is to convert all to use the template oxon, and that was done when the conversion took place, though maybe some articles are not using it, which is fine as user:sDrewthbot has the requisite code on its pages for AWB replacements. I'll dig up the code and my finding tool and put them on the conversion list. — billinghurst sDrewth 09:39, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

pagepile list newly generated of all the subpages of the work

petscan:23037688 those outstanding — billinghurst sDrewth 11:07, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

@Billinghurst: No, we definitely can't remove it before we've found a replacement (AO is the big remaining user; the rest seem much easier to handle). The current global style sets the following:

.leftoutdent {
	padding-left: 2em;
	text-indent: -2em;
	max-width: 33em;
	margin-left: 5em;
}

I don't know which aspects of that are important here (is it just the block center and max width?). The left margin I had guessed was just to give a gutter on the left, which I thought Layout 2's automatic left and right margins would accomplish. And the max-width of 33em I took to be near enough Layout 2's 36em. So the only thing that'd be missing is the padding/indent combo (hanging indent) which neither Layout 2 nor any of the other existing layouts provide.

In any case… If none of the current dynamic layouts are suitable we have several options. We can make a new layout, if it would be applicable for all/most/many biographical dictionaries, and then you could set that layout from {{oxon}} (just throw {{default layout|name}} in there). And then you could control it the same way for other work-specific templates (DNB and so forth), but still leave readers the option to override it if they want. We could add the necessary style to Index styles (the new Style tab on Index pages) for the relevant index pages and just switch out the class name to something work-specific. Or (probably easier in this case, since there are multiple Index pages involved) give {{oxon}} a custom stylesheet loaded with TemplateStyles.

Since I don't know what aspects of the current style are important or whether it'd be applicable outside AO I don't think I can make any specific recommendations about the best approach. On a completely general basis, and from a technical perspective, I'm biased towards using the dynamic layouts as much as possible; but all the options have their pros and cons. --Xover (talk) 13:25, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

I have moved the styling to Template:Oxon/styles.css and we can play with it from there. The style itself well pre-dates all those developments of mobile phone usage, much less template styles. We only want to apply it to the biographical pages, not all the subpages. Left margin irrelevant; width as the bios are typically short and lost on long lines, actual length was an arbitrary choice of something. — billinghurst sDrewth 00:14, 16 October 2022 (UTC)