Template talk:TB

Prod objection

I've removed the {{prod}}, which was left with a rationale of "unnecessary template redirect for an abbreviation otherwise unused on the wiki".

That's circular reasoning:

1. All template redirects are technically "unnecessary" (unless one has been hard-coded into something, and even that could be fixed).
2. More to the point, "TB" is unused here only because the template shortcut doesn't exist. If it existed, it would be used by those more familiar with "TB" as an abbreviation of Tribunal. That's, well, nearly everyone in the present-day Morrowind community. "TB" is disused only by UESP long-timers, because they've conditioned themselves since Ye Olde Tymes to think "TR = Tribunal". Though even back in the 2000s, "TB" was common anyway, since Tamriel Rebuilt got started right after the original game was released and has been running continuously since then. Consider this: The project is almost as old as Wikipedia.

While the intentional focus of the UESP site is on the official content, we need to take into account readers' and editors' heads, too. Nuking this shortcut is counter-productive, editorially, because the real player community, which means the stock of incoming editors as well as readers, are mostly mod freaks, and the largest and longest-running active modding project pretty much ever is Tamriel Rebuilt. The entire community habitually uses "TB = Tribunal" and "TR = Tamriel Rebuilt", because trying "TR = Tribunal" is ambiguous and confusing.

It's not useful to approach redirects in terms of "I want to delete as much stuff as possible, especially if I won't use it personally", and think instead in terms of "redirects are cheap, and template redirects exist for editors' convenience and error-avoidance". It's worth having {{TB}} actually work as intended to produce a Tribunal link. The fact that there's a "TR:" namespace shortcut is pretty irrelevant; there should be a "TB:" one too, and these exist for editorial convenience in talk pages; they shouldn't be used in articles, since they produce links that are rather opaque to readers. It's trouble enough for them that this site has so many namespaces, and they shouldn't be confronted by namespace shortcuts in the links they get.

I would actually propose to change the underlying template to {{TB}} and have it emit output of ^TB, to match actual MW community usage. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 18:50, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

This redirect has no legitimate purpose on this wiki at this time. Until such a time as the shortcut for the namespace and the mod are changed to TB, only TR should be used. TB should never be used, and any that are need to be changed to TR. The arguments for the switch are entirely understandable, and very logical, but that change needs to happen before this template shortcut can have any usage. This isn't a simple change because of the namespace, when TR is used in linking, as the template can be used for, it produces a link to the Tribunal namespace. The change requires modification of the underlying mediawiki code for the namespace, otherwise just changing the superscript for the addon will lead to massive confusion. In short, the namespace code has to be changed before this can be used. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 19:48, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Silencer basically outlined all of my reasons for proposing the deletion. TR is the namespace, so this template redirect is not appropriate. The acronym for Tamriel Rebuilt is TR3. —Legoless (talk) 21:11, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

An acronym no one else in the world appears to use. I've already addressed all of this above, in considerable detail. PS: Silencer's "The change requires modification of the underlying mediawiki code for the namespace" stuff doesn't appear to be relate to anything under actual discussion. While, yes, changing the actual namespace shortcut requires, well, changing the actual namespace shortcut (a tautology), whether or not that every happens has no effect at all on the operation of the redirect, which works just fine. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 01:19, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

You've completely missed the point. The reason these shortcut templates exists is because of the shortcut namespace code, not for any other reason. TR exists because the shortcut for Tribunal is TR. TB is not a shortcut for anything on the wiki and so has no place here. I've restored the prod because this discussion is being overlooked for the very reason no-one has any reason to object to a deletion that will never happen without the template being in place. No admin has come to look over the discussion because there was no reason to look here. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 01:32, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

"Until such a time as the shortcut for the namespace and the mod are changed to TB, only TR should be used." Is that a possible solution to this debate? In the short term, it might confuse people, but in the long term, people would eventually get used to TB. In terms of namespace abbreviations, both could be left in place for now, and we could encourage people to change them to TB when making other edits to a page. Several templates would probably have to be changed (I'm especially thinking of those that use namespace abbreviations for parameter names or values, like Lore Link), but most of that could probably be handled by the bot.

Don't mistake this for support for the idea of changing it, as it would be a fairly big job and I'm not sure how much would actually come out of it at the end of the day...I'm just asking if we want to explore that option and/or debate it in the wider forum of CP, perhaps. (Note: this ties into the suggestion to merge some parent/child namespaces, which I know some people have tossed around, since it would be virtually the same process.) – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 02:48, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

No. TB should not be used or exist until such a change is made, then TR might continue to exist for while before it is phased out. There hasn't even been an attempt to change the namespace shortcut yet, so it isn't good to encourage confusion with this shortcut. I don't think it would be that hard to change the database to use TB. I'm not against a change either, its just that that discussion needs to occur before things are forcibly changed. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 23:35, 31 May 2018 (UTC)