Template talk:Cat disambig

From Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Cat disambig

[edit]

@Verdy p: Please see Category:Seals and how the hatnote is formatted by hand. I feel like we really need a "For..." template to assist with categories like this, to explain what the categories are, instead of just "not to be confused with..." The animals known as seals are found in Category:Pinnipedia which needs an explanation (Pinnipedia is not a common word), as does Category:Seals (mechanical). The current templates don't seem to accomplish this. Is this something that could be added to this template, or do we need expansion on Template:For2? Thanks. — ʷiḳỉℳẚṅ₫¡₳ (talk) 16:17, 29 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

✓ Done Category:Seals. You can reuse the same {{Cat see also}} template with an additional "for=" parameter to add a precision after the listed target category name(s). verdy_p (talk) 17:02, 29 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Rename to Cat distinguish

[edit]

Disambiguation templates typically are used in pages/categories that serve entirely as a disambiguation hub. In contrast, the model used by this template (a disambiguation hatnote to be placed at the top of a regular category) is normally used in templates named "distinguish", "for", "about", "see also", etc.

This discrepancy has even led to the creation of a separate template with a similar name, "Category disambiguation", as evidenced in this discussion. That category got eventually redirected into {{Disambig}}, so now we have the confusing situation where:

My proposal: Let's rename this to "Cat distinguish", with a redirect from Template:Category distinguish, and make all the "Cat[egory] Disambig[uation]" redirects point to {{Disambig}}. That way the situation becomes consistent and intuitive. CC Verdy p and the participants in the aforementioned discussion: emk, Achim55 and Liuxinyu970226. -- Waldyrious (talk) 10:17, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not problem for the unification of templates (as long as redirects are kept as aliases), except that would prefer keeping the term "disambig(uate)" rather than "distinguish". "Disambiguation" is a standard term used in many places in MediaWiki itself and its documentation.
But why was the code silently removed, in some edits made before this proposal, that was tracking into Category:Disambiguation categories all categories that are including the template (where they should all be listed with 0 members), as well as the code that checked non-empty ones ? I think this was made by the assumption that "What links" here special page gives, except that there are various links from page that are not categories, or from some categories that are actually not disambiguated but just linked to the template in some part of their description (and actually not transcluding the template itself).
I know that tracking such non-empty category is not full-proof, as there are sometimes delays in propagating some changes when various files are uploaded to these categories or their description is changed: the counters are not reflected immediately in the category page itself, so that's why we still need a counter-independant tracking category (some bots may regularly, but not very often) apply null edits to assert the counters and actualize the non-empty categories, by vistiing the full list; but the recent changes that removed that code makes these categories no longer traceable by assertion checking bots. verdy_p (talk) 20:58, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]