Template talk:Questionable

Dallan,

Personally, I think any of the last several color iterations were fine---(grey is as good as any, though a little color keeps things from getting too utilitarian (something I dislike about Wikipedia---very monotonous, very machine like, can get very boring). The width issue for me is solely related to meeting end user needs---can it be viewed without pushing into the right hand side bar? 800px pushes into the side bar on my set up. 600 works OK if you have the screen width fully opened. But most users probably can't tell there's a problem. I presume whether they can see the problem depends on a) their monitor, and b) screen specifications. There's probably a minimum width that creates no problem for anyone, but I don't know what that is.

I think there is indeed a need filled by this template. Like wikipedia, there are a lot of things that are going to be works in progress, because no one can do it all. So its important that there be a mechanism for marking problems when they are seen, even if the spotter can't spend the time to fix it, or doesn't know HOW to fix it. If the underlying idea for the site was to allow folks to simply park their family tree, then it wouldn't much matter---their tree is their tree, faults and all, and if they can't spot the problems, ---well its their tree.

But in this environment, that's not what's going on---every card belongs to everyone one---original creator, and past, present and future editors. All have a say in what's on the card. In this environment everyone has the right and responsibility to make note of issues. That's best done on the article page itself, as it is done on Wikipedia. Things on the talk page are just going to be lost or ignored.

The main issue on this is how this is handled. The position neutral approach of this template is, I think, the best approach. I doubt that anyone would find this offensive. I've done occassional flags on articles with problems of this nature, and I've yet to see any adverse response. Sometimes there's even a positive response. So I think this works.

By the way, exactly what is it that the triple brackets do? This is always been a problem for me, as I can't find things like this explained very well on Wikipedia. I know there are lots of "magic" combinations. I just don't know what they are or what they do. Q 20:37, 27 May 2009 (EDT)

I don't have a preference much one way or the other as to the color. It seemed like there was some discussion about purple/yellow being too loud, so I thought I would change it to grey to see if people liked that better, or they could change it back to purple.

At 600px the edge of the banner slides under the google ads on a 1024x768 monitor. This isn't really a bad thing though. I downsized it to 500px again just to see if people liked that better than 600px. I could go either way.

I too think that if we can point out potential problems in a non-threatening way it will benefit everyone. At the same time I think it's also good to highlight well-documented pages -- along the lines of the images that you proposed.

The {{{1}}} brackets mean to insert the first parameter at that position. So if a page had the template reference: {{questionable|mother died before child was born}}, the phrase "mother died before child was born" replaces {{{1}}} in the template text when it is included on the page. There's actually quite a bit you can do with templates, and even more when I upgrade to the latest version of the MediaWiki software.--Dallan 22:33, 27 May 2009 (EDT)

I hate the gray, but if it makes the template more acceptable okay.--Beth 00:45, 28 May 2009 (EDT)

I don't have a preference on the color; it's fine with me if you want to change it. (Probably not red or yellow, but pretty much anything else.)--Dallan 10:15, 23 June 2009 (EDT)