Template talk:Months
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This template is part of WikiProject Days of the Year, a Wikiproject dedicated to improving and maintaining the style guide for date pages. |
This is the talk/discussion page for: Template:Months.
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[edit] Created
This message is currently used on the pages for the 12 months and on 366 day pages (see Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Months ). The birthstones are more suitable for the month pages (where there are already listed individually) than for the day pages, thus I removed them from this message. -- User:Docu [ 20 May 2004 ]
- 11-Jan-2008: Back in May 2004, the template really was, as the name stated, links only to 12 months. On 24 October 2006, the "Template:Months" became months+days, as 12+366 = 378 links. -Wikid77 (talk) 08:23, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Jan 32
Jan 32 is linked to the doomsday algo. I dont get it. Is that vandalism or is Jan 32 not supposed to be there? Brusegadi 06:22, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Parenthesis around unusual dates?
How about we put parenthesis around the "unusual" dates, like January 0, February 30 etc? Not Feb 29 though. --Apoc2400 (talk) 18:19, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Days linked after October 2006
11-Jan-2008: During 2004 and 2005 (and most of 2006), the template really was, true to the name, links only to 12 months, displayed as a one-row table. On 24 October 2006, the "Template:Months" became months+days, as 12+366 = 378 links. Adding the options "v-d-e" (plus "January 0"/etc.) later generated a total of 386 wikilinks. -Wikid77 (talk) 08:23, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Wikipedia overlink crisis
11-Jan-2008: During 2007, large navigation-boxes were added to more than 50 thousand articles, where each navbox propagated wikilinks to each article, generating millions of extra links in the Wikipedia page-link database(s). The resulting "overlink crisis" (or megalink crisis) has increased total wikilinks, within a few months, by a factor of more than 20. As a small example, the Template:Months started as 12 month-name links in 2004, but grew after October 2006, to have 386 wikilinks, more than 32x times the original count. By Jan. 2008, Template:Months had been linked into 418 pages, generating:
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- Template:Months - in 418 articles * 386 = 161_348 propagated links.
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Those 161,348 links are stored (after the servers are updated) into the Wikipedia page-link database(s) to allow quick display (such as for "What links here"). There are ways to easily avoid overlinks, as discussed below. -Wikid77 (talk) 09:02, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Avoiding overlinked navboxes
11-Jan-2008: Propagating links with navboxes can be avoided by using a navbox-reference to connect the live navbox-links only as a 2nd-article navbox, or a spawned navbox as a menu in a 2nd window of the browser. Although websites have the option to automatically spawn a new menu window, Wikipedia articles could simply rely on right-clicking a navbox reference to spawn that navbox into a 2nd browser window. By spawning navboxes, those links occur only on the navbox menu page. For Template:Months, by changing the template to spawn a days-navbox, the wikilinks could be reduced to about 10 (rather than 386), to generate about 4180 total links, rather than the current 161,348 propagated links. The net improvement would be 157,000 fewer links for the Wikipedia page-link database(s). Plus, users would see navboxes as small, centralized menu windows, not a section scrolled down at the bottom of various article pages. -Wikid77 (talk) 09:24, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Merge with MonthsSource, and rename
Why was this template's main code split into {{MonthsSource}} in October 2006? Can they be merged back together, so that only one template needs to be watchlisted, and so that only one template needs to be transcluded to each instance?
Should this template be renamed, now that it encompasses days? To something like {{Monthsanddays}}, perhaps? (As a list of just the months, {{Month header}} is currently in use on the 12 pages.) -- Quiddity (talk) 20:24, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
- I was never quite sure how the Template:MonthsSource was used. It seems to me that it is not usable on its own but needs to be wrapped in something like Template:Months does. Can it be used standalone? Template:Months is a nice wrapper. -- Mufka (u) (t) (c) 20:31, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
- Looking at it, we could easily merge Template:MonthsSource into Template:Months. I like the way the latter looks. I think that merge would go very smoothly. -- Mufka (u) (t) (c) 20:43, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
- Per edited comments above by Quiddity: It doesn't make sense to me. Perhaps User:Eleassar will be watching this and comment on why it was done. -- Mufka (u) (t) (c) 21:39, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
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- Some of the contents of {{Months}} was moved to a separate template {{MonthsSource}} in October 2006 in order to be included in the List of historical anniversaries without the table formatting of the template Months. It seems this is not needed anymore so I have no objections in merging together. --Eleassar my talk 10:01, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Non-standard dates
It seems to me that this template should list only standard dates (i.e. not February 31, etc.). What is the general feeling on this? -- Mufka (u) (t) (c) 18:53, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
- I'm intrigued by the currently-included nonstandard dates (February 31, 0 January, March 0), but I understand the sentiment of not wishing to include them. They've been added and removed a few times recently. Perhaps they could be moved to the end, in a See also line? -- Quiddity (talk) 20:01, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
- There were comments saying see discussion before removing, but this is about the only discussion about this. Since the general emphasis seems to be to remove non standard dates, that was done. --ČσъяạβҜ †Talk† 16:36, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
- Since this is the only discussion, I don't really see any big consensus one way or the other. I don't see the need for all the 0s, but I do think February 30 should be on there since that date has actually been used, and since the template is only used on the date and month articles, I don't see a reason to leave off the ones that actually have articles, and it also seems kind of silly to have the template on a page that doesn't include the article on it. PaulGS (talk) 22:54, 26 July 2008 (UTC)
- Alternatively, how about adding "Gregorian calendar" to the header? Revert if at all problematic. -- Quiddity (talk) 00:02, 27 July 2008 (UTC)
- No problem. You already did it. Georgia guy (talk) 00:04, 27 July 2008 (UTC)
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- Adding Gregorian doesn't seem right. Doesn't the Julian Calendar use the same month lengths (after 45BC)? In that case wouldn't it be the same either way? -- Mufka (u) (t) (c) 23:31, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
- Just a comment to throw into the mix-- I learned about the Doomsday method because I was curious about "March 0" on this template several months ago. I'm really glad I stumbled across that article-- it's been really useful! So for what it's worth, I'd vote to keep the 0s in. Brakiton (talk) 04:28, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
Gregorian removed, and a new test made. As before, improve or revert if problematic. Ideas welcome. Thanks :) -- Quiddity 06:11, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
