Forum:SH:Adding a required "reason" parameter to Template:Expand

This page is an archive of a community-wide discussion. This page is no longer live. Further comments or questions on this topic should be made in a new Senate Hall page rather than here so that this page is preserved as a historic record. JocastaBot (talk) 20:54, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
Forums > Senate Hall archive > SH:Adding a required "reason" parameter to Template:Expand

(I originally made a Consensus Track thread for this at Forum:CT:Adding a required "reason" parameter to Template:Expand, but I was told that it might be a good idea to made a Senate Hall thread first.)

In its current form, Template:Expand seems to be prone to drive-by tagging, or editors leaving the tag with no explanation. When no explanation is given, it is impossible to tell what exactly the tagger wanted expanded and whether those changes have already been made. While the tag does give a link to the talk page, the request for expansion is rarely found there, or at least not under a clearly labelled section.

I think that it would be useful to add a required reason= parameter, similar to the reason= parameter in the cleanup template on Wikipedia. If no reason is specified, the template will not display correctly. This change would affect the thousands of articles that are currently tagged, but these articles are already affected by the issue of being tagged with a vague template that may very well stay there forever. On these pages, the templates can either be removed or have reasons added to them.

The template could display similar to this:

TPMCGYoda

Master Qui-Gon, more to say, have you?

It is requested that this article, or a section of this article, be expanded.

The specific request is: (The text added to the reason parameter would display here.) Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Once the improvements have been completed, you may remove this notice.

The exact wording can be tweaked. Note that I also removed the mention of the "listing" because no such thing exists.

I think that doing this would make the template far more useful because it would let editors know what it is that needs to be expanded and whether or not that thing has already been accomplished. Evil Sith Lord (talk) 10:35, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Comments

  • I think this could potentially be useful, especially in terms of giving people the courage to remove the template when they've fixed the the specific issue, but it would definietly need to be an optional parameter. As you've said, this template is already used without said parameter on a huge number of pages and we don't want broken templates showing all across the site. Ayrehead02 (talk) 12:07, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
    • This is not really an issue, as we can have a bot add, let say, "reason=1" (with the code interpreting it as a null value which will not display anything) to all current use to bypass it. Regarding the proposal, it seems reasonable, why not. --NanoLuukeCloning facility 12:02, 31 December 2021 (UTC)