From Wikitravel

Contents 1 Usage 2 Quickbar templates - request for comment 2.1 Quickbar for States 3 Including maps 4 Order of image/flag/location map 5 Image padding 6 Wiki links for time zone & calling code? 7 Requests for Quickbar-ectomies 8 Quickbars on states?

Usage

This template replaces the HTML quickbars previously used in country templates. To implement use the following format (note that the location, flag, and main images MUST NOT be wider than 250px):

{{quickbar
| image=[[Image:image|noframe|250px]]
| flag=[[Image:flag]]
| location=[[Image:location|noframe|250px]]
| capital=[[Capital]]
| government=Type of government
| currency=Currency used
| area=Country area
| population=Population
| language=[[Language1]], [[Language2]], Language3, ...
| religion=Religion(s)
| electricity=Electrical voltage and current
| callingcode=Calling code
| tld=Internet top level domain
| timezone=Time zone(s) in relation to UTC
}}

Quickbar templates - request for comment

Swept in from the Pub:

While trying to track down existing templates for the Wikitravel:Template index page I came across User:JanSlupski/Projects/QuickBar, which was an attempt to create templates to use for quickbars. The advantages cited were that this would bring some consistency to how quickbars are implemented, and it would be less intimidating for a user to see {{quickbar|title=""|population=""|etc}} then the current batch of HTML that begins most articles with quickbars. It would be good if others could comment on User talk:JanSlupski/Projects/QuickBar as to whether they think something like this is a good idea, specifically in light of the fact that the current template policy discourages template use, although Evan did recently indicate that his opinions of templates may be changing. -- Ryan 14:13, 3 April 2006 (EDT)

This gets a strong support from me. I think a really brief quickbar template at the top of the page is way easier to grok than the HTML we have now (which predates templates, and MediaWiki tables, by the way).

Question: is it worth writing a bot to change the 200+ country quickbars, or should be just do it as time goes by? Also: JanSlupski's quickbar uses a lot of items. I wonder if, with defaults in templates that we get with MediaWiki 1.6.x, we could cut it down to just one Template:Quickbar. --Evan 17:29, 17 April 2006 (EDT)

There is also Template:Country Quickbar, which looks a bit easier to use. If it's used I think that the name should be changed to just "Template:Quickbar" (as you suggested), and it should then be fairly easy to modify the single template to take default params. I don't have time right now to cobble something together, but if no one beats me to it I could do something later tonight.

As to writing a bot, I'm not sure that the syntax and headers are standard enough that it would be all that easy - it might be easier to kind of change as we go, and with only 200 or so quickbars the change shouldn't be too painful. -- Ryan 17:56, 17 April 2006 (EDT)

I've put together a Template:Quickbar. I've replaced the quickbar for the Falkland Islands and Italy with this template. Let me know if you have any comments. -- Ryan 01:43, 18 April 2006 (EDT)

I tried it out on Picardie, which was a mess before. -- Jonboy 14:03, 18 April 2006 (EDT)

Thanks - it looks like a lot of whitespace is being added, so I'll see if I can fix that. Additionally, do we need the capability to add lists of regions to the quickbar? Currently "departements" is not a supported parameter, but that could be changed if it's something people want to see in the quickbars. My personal feeling is that region lists belong in the main article, but I don't feel so strongly about it that I wouldn't want to change the template if others wanted it changed. -- Ryan 14:30, 18 April 2006 (EDT)

I don't think we need regions in the quickbar, but based on my experience on Wikipedia, it would be nice to have an optional editor-defined item, to allow the inclusion of some factoid that doesn't apply in most cases, but is interesting and relevant to a specific location (e.g. national anthem: "Freebird". To implement it, the template would need to take two parameters: the name of the element and the data for it.

I'm concerned about shortening the name of the template to just "Quickbar". If this is the only kind of quickbar we're going to have, it's fine, but what about templates for other kinds of articles (e.g. cities, itineraries, parks)? If so, maybe "Quickcountry" or something would be more flexibile. The alternative would be to make one quickbar template that can take all kinds of parameters and ignore the irrelevant ones, but I think separate templates would be easier to grok (and to customize, such as color coding). - Todd VerBeek 15:15, 18 April 2006 (EDT)

Responding to Todd's comment above (indentation level was getting a bit deep), it would be pretty easy to add a couple of user-defined headings - for example "heading1=National Anthem", "value1=Freebird", "heading2=", "value2=". I'm not sure if that's the preferred approach, so I'll wait until someone else chimes in before making any changes.

In terms of naming, my personal preference would be to avoid the proliferation of templates that has occurred on Wikipedia by starting out with just one "Quickbar" template. If needed in the future we can always create new types of quickbars, but I don't think it hurts to have one general quickbar now. The current HTML quickbars are implemented with some consistency on country pages, region pages, state pages, and possibly even on a few city pages, so having a "general" quickbar template seems to be reasonable way to encompass how quickbars are currently used on the site. -- Ryan 17:09, 18 April 2006 (EDT)

Quickbar for States

Way back I put a quick bar on three of the US states. Maine, Arkansas and Oklahoma and maybe another one or two. I can't remember for sure if there where more. I kind of like it, but I would prefer to get a consensus before moving and doing more. And, if there is a consensus to do this I am thinking the best way would be to have a template. All three of the states were the same to start, but wikitravlers have made a couple of changes on the one in Oklahoma. Let me know what you think. If consensus is not to do this, I would be happy to remove the one's I put in place. Thanks. -- Tom Holland (xltel) 16:29, 7 June 2006 (EDT)

For what it's worth, something similar has been done for regions of France, e.g. Champagne-Ardenne. - Todd VerBeek 17:14, 7 June 2006 (EDT)

Also, before creating another template, what different fields are needed for states? It should be pretty simple to add new fields to this template, and we could also fairly easily add support for a few generic fields to allow users to define their own heading. -- Ryan 17:34, 7 June 2006 (EDT)

To be frank, I'm not a fan of including "state flower" and such on travel articles... that kind of elementary-school-geography info isn't as relevant to me as a potential traveler as the preferred languages, gods, and voltages of a country I might be visiting. Area codes are more practical info, but as soon as a state has more than one or two it doesn't do much good to list them. - Todd VerBeek 17:54, 7 June 2006 (EDT)

I've removed the quickbars from the French regions, and I think it would be prudent to do the same for the US states as well. My reasoning is similar to Todd's - aside from timezone and area code (if not more than one), the information provided really isn't all that useful for travel, and it can be tough to then draw the line. For example, is it appropriate to create a quickbar for any region? For cities? What then goes in the quickbar? Perhaps in the future if there are some guidelines created about what is valid information for a quickbar then we can revisit this issue, but for now I think the information is better off in the main article for non-country articles. I'll hold off on making further changes to allow others to comment, but unless there are objections then I'll probably remove them in the future as part of the quickbar-ectomy that is in progress. -- Ryan 09:21, 1 July 2006 (EDT)

Including maps

Should we include maps in the country quick bars? I'd suggest under the "location" map. - Andrew Haggard (Sapphire) 15:53, 13 June 2006 (EDT)

The two concerns I'd have would be 1) the map would be very tiny, and 2) the quickbar is getting a bit crowded. Looking at Italy as an example, I kind of like the way it's laid out now. That said, I'm terrible with aesthetics, so other opinions should carry a bit more weight than mine. -- Ryan 16:37, 13 June 2006 (EDT)

I've been thinking that we really should appropriate more of those location maps, probably for every country. They're Free and they're useful. I don't think they look bad in the quickbar... if any graphic element is going to go, I'd be inclined to (re)move the flags (provided there's a nice photo in place). - Todd VerBeek 17:14, 13 June 2006 (EDT)

Just in case I've bungled my words again, I'm very much in favor of the location maps in the quickbar, I just don't think we should also put the full country map in the quickbar. Italy is a great example of how the location map can be useful even in a small form.

I looked into getting more of those maps from Wikipedia, but many have been licensed as GFDL only. I've left a note on WikiPedia:User talk:Vardion#CC-SA licensing for maps? asking if he will re-license CC-SA, but he seems to be traveling and so it may be a while before we get a response. -- Ryan 17:31, 13 June 2006 (EDT)

I like the location maps too and I like the flags also so I don't think anything should go. Regarding the licensing the location maps. Some of them are available as PD. In theory we can use one that's licensed as public domain then edit the images to suit our needs, right? - Andrew Haggard (Sapphire) 17:35, 13 June 2006 (EDT)

• I have a map include on a quick bar for Russia. You can see it on my sandbox test page. Thoughts? I also have the code prepared to replace the Templat:Quickbar ready, but I'm not going to mess with that yet. The map is a bit smaller than it would be if we left it free standing in an article, but I'd rather include it in the quick bar, because I think it cleans up the look of articles. Andrew Haggard (Sapphire) 17:26, 13 June 2006 (EDT)

Order of image/flag/location map

After adding a location map to Zambia the quickbar looked a bit odd to me - there was a nice landscape image of elephants, followed by a dinky flag image, followed by a nice location map. Switching the flag so that it is immediately above the "Quick Facts" section looks better to me, but others may disagree. Thoughts (if any)? -- Ryan 15:12, 27 June 2006 (EDT)

I like the way you ordered it. Image/Location/Map/Facts. - Andrew Haggard (Sapphire) 16:00, 27 June 2006 (EDT)

Image padding

Another minor change, but I'm leaving a note here since quickbars are now used on a lot of pages. The "location" map image had 2px padding around it, but the "image" image had 0px padding. I've added 2px of padding to the "image" image as well, which looks better to me - see Singapore or United States of America. As always, I'm terrible with aesthetics, so if anyone feels strongly that the image looks better without padding feel free to revert. -- Ryan 19:26, 29 June 2006 (EDT)

Wiki links for time zone & calling code?

Any objection to updating this template so that the timezone header, electricty header, and the callingcode header link to Time zones, Electrical systems and List of country calling codes, respectively? I'm personally not very familiar with "UTC", and the voltage thing for electricity can be a bit confusing, so the additional links might be helpful for people. -- Ryan 10:13, 1 July 2006 (EDT)

No objection; it's certainly harmless. - Todd VerBeek 10:24, 1 July 2006 (EDT)

Done. The Singapore quickbar looked a bit odd to me after making the change, so I've also modified the template to prevent headings from wrapping ("Calling Code" was appearing on two lines). -- Ryan 10:32, 1 July 2006 (EDT)

Requests for Quickbar-ectomies

Moved from the Pub:

The recently introduced quickbar template is now in use in over a hundred articles, but there are still a substantial number of articles using the old quickbar. Converting to the new format is pretty easy, so anyone interested in helping out can use this link to locate pages still implementing an HTML quickbar, and then edit the page to use the following syntax:

{{quickbar
| image=[[Image:image|noframe|250px]]
| flag=[[Image:flag]]
| location=[[Image:location|noframe|250px]]
| capital=[[Capital]]
| government=Type of government
| currency=Currency used
| area=Country area
| population=Population
| language=[[Language1]], [[Language2]], Language3, ...
| religion=Religion(s)
| electricity=Electrical voltage and current
| callingcode=Calling code
| tld=Internet top level domain
| timezone=Time zone(s) in relation to UTC
}}

If you don't feel like looking up a field it can be left empty, such as "timezone=". In addition, Todd points out the following:

It's not terribly difficult; I've done dozens of them already. The most time-consuming part of it is looking up the usually-missing bits (which are all optional, but as long as you're there you might as well), and picking a pretty picture if you're so inclined. Here are some handy references: TLDs [1], electricity [2], calling codes, and time zones. - Todd VerBeek 13:58, 7 June 2006 (EDT)

This isn't a critical task, but the more people who feel like helping out the faster it will get done. -- Ryan 22:22, 13 June 2006 (EDT)

And it looks like, after a few weeks of mostly Ryan and me tag-teaming it, we've finished! At this point, it is theoretically possible to move, reformat, etc. all of the country/territory quickbars at once by editing a handful of templates. - Todd VerBeek 22:02, 2 July 2006 (EDT)

Quickbars on states?

Moved from the Pub:

I've noticed whilst trawling through Wikitravel upgrading the old quickbars to the new template that alot of the states in the US and also a few of the departements in France have quickbars... Do these actually need quickbars? In most cases, the info in the bar is merely a summary of what is already written in the wordy bit of the article or a copy of what is written in the country's quickbar, such as language spoken, currency, internet domain, time zone etc. A few examples of this are Maine, Poitou-Charentes. For the sake of uniformity throughout wikitravel, I believe we should either

• quickbar all such states/departements/provinces with a tailor made region quickbar template

OR

• remove quickbars from states/departements/provinces.

However, in my opinion if we put region quickbars in, the kinds of things that could be put in - such as main sights - would require explanations in the See / Do sections.... What do other people think? Tsandell 07:54, 26 June 2006 (EDT)

Those quickbars don't appeal to me. The timezone info is nice to have. OldPine 09:44, 26 June 2006 (EDT)

See Template talk:Quickbar#Quickbar for States. -- Ryan 10:27, 26 June 2006 (EDT)