Wikipedia talk:Hatnote/Archive 9

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Archive 9

Re-resurrection of italicization question

The issue of italicized italics in hatnotes which are already in italics was discussed in 2017 and again in 2019. I've just found those discussions now, as I don't watch discussions on this page. The 2019 discussion led to the introduction of the Wikipedia:Hatnote § Hatnotes with italics in the links section by SchreiberBike on 28 August 2019 (diff).

A couple of reasonable objections to this convention were raised:

The point of the italics in the hatnote is to show that it is not part of the actual article, so any other formatting is confusing. Siuenti (씨유엔티) 23:56, 10 April 2017 (UTC)
In my IRL work I used to take the un-italicize route, but at some point I decided to looks weird, and I began to underline, like this:

I'm not going so far as to recommend that for use here, but just thought I'd throw it out. E Eng 11:04, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

I agree with both of those points – it's debatable whether the "non-italic" formatting is confusing or helpful, and it looks weird. In addition to those issues, I'll add my own.

The purpose of hatnotes is navigation. They are a part of the tools readers use to find articles. The main tool they have is the search box. Observe the example search I uploaded. A reader searching for the Abaratha alida article just types "Abaratha alida" into the search box. They are not required to type the name in italics. Indeed, if they try to italicize the title in the search box, they run into trouble:

The page "''Abaratha alida''" does not exist. You can create a draft and submit it for review, or you may create the page "Abaratha alida" directly, but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered.

The list of search results shows all results in normal text. It does not distinguish titles which are italicized from those which are not. Then the "Search for pages containing" link always italicizes the title which to search for in pages. It doesn't "non-italic" the title to search for pages containing the italicized title. In short, the convention for use of italics in search is different from the convention used in the bodies of articles.

Italics in hatnotes can cause false-positive population of Category:Missing redirects, a category I patrol. This is why I've started this discussion today. The hatnote on Nocturnes (Debussy) is populating this category, because of the use of "non-italic" in the hatnote:

"Trois Nocturnes" redirects here. For other uses, see Three Nocturnes.

The problem is that no, ''Trois Nocturnes'' does not redirect to there. Trois Nocturnes, in plain text, is what actually redirects there. Italics do not work inside Wikilinks. They must be placed outside the Wikilink to work properly.

This problem also came up recently at Interdiction of MV Matthew, where, after conflicting with Tamzin, I resorted to creating a custom {{hatnote}}, to avoid the issue. This compromise means that the page has been removed from the hatnote patrol, making it more vulnerable to potential future vandalism or other issues that the hatnote might have detected.

Issue goes back to my August 2015 RfA, where there was concern about I redirect I created in order to accommodate a Chinese character in a hatnote:

This leaves four which might be considered problems. Two of these were redirects: ''唐山'' was deleted following Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2014 November 20#Several redirects that have wiki markup in their titles;... --Redrose64 (talk) 11:39, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, Redrose. I created ''唐山'' because an editor was quite persistent in insisting that Chinese characters should not be italicized in hatnotes. I would have been happy to have simply removed that foreign-language "redirects here" hatnote, but they insisted on keeping it. So, my compromise kludge was to create that redirect to keep the page out of the "flagged for maintenance" category. I was quite happy to see the redirect finally come off that page, which in turn made my work-around unnecessary. Wbm1058 (talk) 12:16, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

For the reasons given above, the section Wikipedia:Hatnote § Hatnotes with italics in the links should be removed. wbm1058 (talk) 14:36, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm not understanding what the problem is? Italics work fine in hatnotes, using '' outside links or making use of the {{!}} template when piping is needed (e.g. when only part of the title needs to be italicised. For occasions when it's the "redirects here" that needs partially italicising then just use a custom hatnote template (or someone more skilled than me can create a new standard one). When items that would normally be italicised occur in otherwise italicised text the standard is to deitalicise it, and other than your personal dislike of that I'm not seeing any reason to deviate from that standard? Thryduulf (talk) 18:53, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
While, as one of the people writing code for hatnotes, italicization is annoying, I think I generally lean towards including it, and largely agree with Thryduulf.
Where I diverge from Thryduulf is that I'd prefer to not either use custom hatnotes or change the behaviour of {{redirect}} and similar: when we display the redirected title, we are mentioning title text (a string that is recognized by MediaWiki), and not an actual title (a name for a specific subject), therefore we should not (de)italicize in those cases—a razor-sharp semantic distinction, to be sure, but it seems reasonable to me. I can probably add an option so that you can do something like {{redirect|Foo|redirectmask1=Bar}} to specify italicization, but since I disagree with the semantics, I don't want to write it unless we get a consensus that it's preferred.
Longer-term, I wish we'd get a way to pull the title content of {{DISPLAYTITLE:title}} via something in the mw.title Scribunto library (without, you know, transcluding and pattern-matching the whole page for the DISPLAYTITLE declaration) so that I could automate away having to manually specify italics most of the time, but that's a whole other suggestion. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 23:38, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Can you center a hatnote, rather than it just be indented?

Sometimes it looks as though it doesn't stand out enough, like it's engulfed by the section header and the text of that section. Just wondering how I offset that. Thanks. --Cinemaniac86^Talk_Stalk 17:21, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

You could try adding a few colons before the template, although it's likely someone will eventually delete them as non-standard. Station1 (talk) 17:40, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Indeed they would, also per MOS:INDENT, since it would be an abuse of list markup for visual indentation which is an accessibility problem (despite the fact that we permit it on talk pages; that should have been fixed a long time ago by a parser change to handle line-initial colons differently on talk pages). If you insist on indenting something in an article for visual effect, use {{block indent}}, {{indent}} or {{in5}}, which ever works better for the use case in question (or {{blockquote}}, but only if it is actual block quotation). Back to hatnotes: The desire expressed here seems to be based on something like mobile device viewports, and does not take account of the fact that on a wide monitor, centring the hatnote would have the opposite of the desired effect, and move it so far inward in the wide viewport that it would be less likely to be noticed. There is no consensus to change the layout of hatnote placement, and unlikely there would ever be one, so going around massively indenting or centring them is apt to be seen as unconstructive WP:MEATBOT behavior and reverted. PS: It's also important to remember that our hatnotes are just cross-references and are not part of the article content, but a form of permissible Wikipedia self-reference that we tolerate as something that can be useful for readers, for specific purposes and when it is not done in excess. Using visual trickery to make them much more promiment [for a particular class of users] than the real content is against their purpose and design. So don't go around making them boldface or orange or all-caps, either. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:09, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for that adorable advice. No, no rainbows or crazy-Karen-capslock-hatnote shouting, like my mom on Facebook. This was just a hypothetical inquiry. I tested out the asterisk, pound, and colon indents, and they just looked ugly and disjointed. And a "br" in between left too large a gap.

Actually, I'm on a laptop, not a mobile. The situation in question is on an actress's article page, Bette Davis#Selected filmography. Initially, with the two columns, it only said "main article: Bette Davis filmography". But altering it to this more descriptive hatnote emphasizes the page better; and it isn't so short, where it looks as if it's the first item on the list at first glance. That's what I was bothered about at first.

In any event though, thank you both @Station1 & @SMcCandlish for your input! Much appreciated. Idk if you think there was a better solution, but I'll opt to try different hatnotes first that fit the situation and keep in mind that advice you mentioned above. --Cinemaniac86^Talk_Stalk 20:49, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

@Cinemaniac86: It looks okay to me, in that it's how hatnotes always appear in front of lists, but I think what you're concerned about is that a hatnote is usually indented a little from the content that follows it, and here it is not (in effect) because they are all list items that are also indented the same amount. Because the original intent of the hatnote template is to be slightly indented from main text (not centred!), an argument could thus be made to indent it more, by the same amount, in this kind of case. I happen to randomly know (from various template work) that the indentation amount is 1.6em, so the intended effect here could be done with:

{{block indent|{{Main list|Bette Davis filmography}}|left=1.6|reason=Hatnotes are supposed to indent a bit from the content after them, so this will do that when the content is itself an indented list.}}

Actually, the same effect could be done by just doubling the "hatnoteness":

{{hatnote|{{Main list|Bette Davis filmography}}|reason=Hatnotes are supposed to indent a bit from the content after them, so this will do that when the content is itself an indented list.}}

Both code approaches have an identical visual output for the reader. But Station1 is probably correct that someone is apt to remove it later as unnecessary/nonstandard. An explanatory |reason= might forestall such reversion. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:14, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Awesomesauce. You da man, sort-of-Gary Oldman. Thanks! --Cinemaniac86^Talk_Stalk 00:12, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Notability

Hi. Is there any notability requirement for disambiguation hatnotes? I'm looking at Gyroid which has a dab hat to Animal Crossing (video game), where the term is mentioned only in passing. My impression is the dab hn is undue. fgnievinski (talk) 03:58, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Would a redirect from the term, here "Gyroid", be compliant with WP:Redirect and particularly WP:R#KEEP? If so, then if the term has other uses, a hatnote or dab page should be provided. PamD 06:23, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Seems akin to MOS:DABMENTION, whose only guidance is the open-ended ...a link to that article may be included if it would provide value to the reader. —Bagumba (talk) 09:01, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Well, the whole purpose of the encyclopedia is to "provide value to the reader", so let's help them. PamD 09:14, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

FWIW, I've never seen clear guidance on which trivial mentions are useful, and which are are not. —Bagumba (talk) 09:24, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's another thing left to consensus at a particular article's talk page. We have a whole lot of those, and they are often lead to butt-pain disputes, but are a necessary cost of WP:CREEP being a concern that most of the community have. That is, if we tried to nail down everything we can think of in explicit rules, it would take all year just to read our rules and no one would be able to remember more than a fraction of them. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:22, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

PS: Looked at the articles, and am inclined to keep the hatnote. If it were an occurrence of a gyroid or a pentagonal icositetrahedron (also called a gyroid) in the game, then it would not be a necessary hatnote, but it's a video game character which is a different sort of thing, and the game is popular, so various readers would be looking for it and the two non-game articles have nothing to do with it. It's just a fact of the times that video-game schtuff is "important" to various readers. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:26, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

There should be at least a full sentence about the hat's topic in the target article. Not everything mentioned in another article is worth a dab hat. fgnievinski (talk) 00:55, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

Meh. By that reasoning, we would have an entire "WP:HFD", "WP:Hatnotes for deletion" process that examined hatnote link targets (the content of which can change at any time). The whole paragraph or even section that is in a page this minute might turn into just a sentence in the next minute, or vice versa. The coverage being in the article at all should be sufficient (as long as it's actually a distinct topic that happens to share the same name as other topic(s) and needs disambiguation). Maybe this makes me a "hatnote inclusionist", but our goal with hanotes should be getting readers to what they are looking for, whether we think they should be looking for it or not and whether we think they'll find much there (as long as they'll find something there). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:23, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

There are two basic questions, will someone searching for a different topic plausibly end up at this article? Will someone searching for a different topic find useful information about that topic at (or via a dab/sia at) the other page? If the answer to both questions is yes then there should be a hatnote. Thryduulf (talk) 03:08, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

Right, but then what do we do if you come across a "hatnote deletionist" (like me)? I propose consensus can be found in WP:R#CRD: if the hatnote doesn't justify the creation of a redirect, then the hatnote shouldn't be posted on another article's lead. In the present case, Gyroid (character) is a reasonable redirect, so you win. fgnievinski (talk) 03:09, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

Despite being here since the Neolithic, I hadn't remembered that CRD thing. Seems like a good thumb-rule to remember; thanks for that. It's more concrete than the "seems reasonable to me" sense I've been using (though I guess what constitutes a sensible redirect is also open to a certain level of debate). Thryduulf's double-razor is pretty useful, too. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:25, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

NAMB not being 'prescribed by the guideline'

The previous discussion was automatically archived to Wikipedia talk:Hatnote/Archive 8#NAMB not being 'prescribed by the guideline', but we didn't conclude much other than we should probably discuss this further. One thing that I don't see any argument about is that the previous edits to the guideline about this were not actually proper, so I'm going to undo these now. --Joy (talk) 19:53, 1 January 2024 (UTC)