User:Sbb/Oops

This page is a log of my wikiblunders for posterity's sake.

Template {{-s}}

TL;DR: I created a template to "fix" a presentation issue, and boldly applied it where I thought it was needed. But I didn't check how it looked using other skins.

The problem I was trying to fix

When italicized text is immediately followed by non-italic text (no space between them), the texts are kerned too tightly together. The {{'}} template is one of a class of several fixes to this problem. In the case of {{'}}, it wraps an apostrophe as such: <span style="padding-left:0.1em;">'</span>. I was seeing this issue while editing ship class pages, where when comparing attributes of different classes, it's convenient to be able to pluralize italicized class names, e.g.: "the Fletchers were longer than the Gleaveses".

At the time of writing this, the following demonstrates the issue if you're using the Vector skin (tortured example that doesn't exist anywhere, but it's grammatically correct, and shows many of the cases):

USS Heermann's class was Fletcher, not one of the Gleaveses or Benson-class destroyers. ← wiki-text

USS Heermann's class was Fletcher, not one of the Gleaveses or Benson-class destroyers. ← <i> with padding-right:0.1em;

The solution I decided on

In a similar vein to the {{'}} and {{'s}} templates, I created the {{-s}} template which was just: <span padding-left:0.1em;>{{{1|s}}}</span>. This avoided a separate {{-es}} template to handle the few instances of pluralized italics ending in "s" or "x". Proud of the simplicity of the template, I boldly started editing ship class pages that could use some proper kerning.

The knock-on problem I created

From my talk page:

Hi, I don't know if you aware of the template with the same name on the French Wikipedia (fr:template:-s). for years, I (and others) have been finding/cleaning up places where people copy-and-paste text from the French Wikipedia to this Wikipedia. I usually do this by checking Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:-s, but now that method doesn't work. for fr:template:e, we have a tracking category, Category:Articles using E without any arguments. we could do something similar in this case if we disallow the |1= parameter and add tracking. or, we could rename your new template? do you have any suggestions on what to do? thank you. Frietjes (talk) 14:25, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Because of the unnamed optional parameter of the {{-s}} template, these editors had a much harder time of catching wholesale copy-paste transcriptions of French-to-English articles (the French version of that template just doesn't apply to English). I tried to solve the problem by creating a standalone {{-es}} template, and removed the optional parameter from {{-s}}, and continued with my edits. But still, what about the tight kerning for other punctuation, such as hyphenation: "Fletcher-class destroyers"?

Really, the problem was with italics in general. This should be a fix to the underlying CSS, or at least for Vector.css. It dawned on me to test other skins (I hardly ever browse Wikipedia with mobile apps). The newer skins looked fine without my "fix".

The real solution going forward

1. Delete the {{-s}} and {{-es}} templates.

2. Undo the edits to the ship class and ship pages I made using those templates.

3. Test other skins before going bull-in-a-china-shop.

4. See if Vector.css can get updated to produce the desired CSS in the <i> tags generated by the wikitext parser.

5. If not, just live with it.

Lesson learned. sbb (talk) 03:03, 14 August 2020 (UTC)