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. Toprawa and Ralltiir (talk) 05:56, February 19, 2013 (UTC)
Am I correct in thinking that {{Ref}} is used on every single reference in every infobox and every succession box, but absolutely nowhere else? I'm thinking that it might be possible to use sitewide CSS to achieve the desired effect without needing to use a special template in the desired places, but as I don't deal with {{Ref}} often, I wanted to double-check the usage first to make sure I'm not missing anything. If I'm right, I'll poke around in the HTML source and see if I can come up with a way to handle it through MediaWiki:Common.css so we can deprecate {{Ref}}. —MJ— Council Chambers 05:20, December 31, 2012 (UTC)
- It used to be that it also did something to keep the coding of ref tags from, for lack of a better word, leaking out of infoboxes when they weren't isolated within the {{ref}} template. Without it, random code would sometimes show up on top of the infobox. I have no idea why this was, or when or if it was fixed. -- Darth Culator (Talk) 06:46, December 31, 2012 (UTC)
- In the roughly four years that I've been here, I've never seen that, and I've encountered plenty of references in infoboxes without being enclosed in {{Ref}}. I'd say that it's safe to assume that it's fixed. —MJ— Training Room 18:34, December 31, 2012 (UTC)
OK, I thought it made the reference number smaller. Now I'm confused. If you want to follow along in these examples, add the following code to wikia.css or monobook.css file (depending on your skin), then bypass your cache:
/* Testing CSS to hopefully deprecate [[Template:Ref]] */
div.reftest .reference, /* infoboxes */
table.reftest .reference { /* succession boxes */
font-size:7.5pt;
font-style:none;
font-weight:normal;
}
The CSS in that block is the exact same CSS that {{Ref}} applies inline. Now here are the examples. For ease of comparison, I recommend opening each group of three in three separate tabs, scrolling down to the exact same position on each tab, and then clicking back and forth to compare the output. If it makes a difference, I use Firefox 17.0.1 on Windows Vista.
- Infobox:
- Succession boxes:
First, look at the infoboxes. {{Ref}} appears to be useless in the infobox, as it has no visible effect when removed, but the addition of the same CSS from the monobook.js file actually increases the size of the references! Perhaps the best solution here is to simply kill {{Ref}} in the infobox and be done with it, skipping the CSS altogether.
Next, look at the succession boxes. This is a little trickier, as by comparing the first two, you can see that {{Ref}} here does reduce the size of references, but only in the header of each box, and it also de-bolds the references in the header and center column. When the CSS above is introduced, however, we get a similar result to {{Ref}}, except that like with the infoboxes, the references are again slightly larger. We need to figure out what style we want here.
What do you guys think? What direction should we proceed here? —MJ— Training Room 19:41, January 1, 2013 (UTC)
Implementation
OK, through a little debugging I was able to adjust the CSS to match the output of {{Ref}} on both infoboxes and succession boxes. The resulting CSS has been added to MediaWiki:Common.css, and {{Ref}} has been reduced to merely passing its parameter to the page unmodified. This means that {{Ref}} is fully deprecated and should not be used any more. My bot will remove all usages of it soon. If you see incorrectly formatted reference numbers somewhere, first purge the server's cache of the page to update the templates, then bypass your cache to update your CSS files. If the problem persists after that, report it here. —MJ— Holocomm 00:32, January 7, 2013 (UTC)
- Wikia appears to be having caching issues, as the new CSS does not seem to be working yet, despite clearing my cache multiple times. A little debugging through Firefox's "Inspect Element" feature shows that it's not being recognized at all in Monobook. However, it appears to be working properly in Oasis. Give it some time for the caching issues to clear up before complaining that "this doesn't look right". If the caching issue isn't resolved by tomorrow, I'll yell at Special:Contact/bug. —MJ— War Room 01:27, January 7, 2013 (UTC)
- And now it seems to be working. I'll give it a day or two to make sure that it works consistently before doing a bot run to remove {{Ref}} en masse. —MJ— Jedi Council Chambers 01:38, January 7, 2013 (UTC)
- Has not been working for me, at least. IFYLOFD (Floyd's crib) 02:12, January 7, 2013 (UTC)
- And now it seems to be working. I'll give it a day or two to make sure that it works consistently before doing a bot run to remove {{Ref}} en masse. —MJ— Jedi Council Chambers 01:38, January 7, 2013 (UTC)
- What precisely is the issue that you're seeing? What browser/skin are you using? If using the latest version of Firefox, right-click on a problematic reference number, select "Inspect Element", click "Style" in the lower right, find the line about "font-size" that's not crossed out (there should only be one not crossed out, probably near the top), and copy and paste the entire surrounding declaration here (from the beginning of the line with the "{" and ending with the final "}". —MJ— Comlink 02:35, January 7, 2013 (UTC)
- I'm using Monobook on Safari. The thing is, neither references with {{Ref}} or without go small in infoboxes or succession boxes anymore. They're all normal-sized references. IFYLOFD (Floyd's crib) 02:49, January 7, 2013 (UTC)
- What precisely is the issue that you're seeing? What browser/skin are you using? If using the latest version of Firefox, right-click on a problematic reference number, select "Inspect Element", click "Style" in the lower right, find the line about "font-size" that's not crossed out (there should only be one not crossed out, probably near the top), and copy and paste the entire surrounding declaration here (from the beginning of the line with the "{" and ending with the final "}". —MJ— Comlink 02:35, January 7, 2013 (UTC)
- Are you sure that you've bypassed your browser cache? It sounds like the page(s) you're looking at have received the change to {{Ref}} that removed the inline styling, but your browser hasn't received the change to MediaWiki:Common.css that added the new styles. At the extreme end, you may have to completely clear your entire cache, as I don't know much about Safari. The online CSS guide I'm looking at says the change should work in Safari the same as Firefox. —MJ— War Room 02:59, January 7, 2013 (UTC)
- Note that the Wikipedia page about bypassing the cache indicates that Safari has issues with bypassing the cache. If nothing else works, clear the entire cache and restart Safari. —MJ— Training Room 03:05, January 7, 2013 (UTC)
- Per discussion here, this is merely a difference between browsers or operating systems in how they handle font size declarations, and not really a bug. In the absence of any further bug reports, I will be starting my bot to completely remove all instances of {{Ref}} probably early afternoon Eastern Time tomorrow (actually later today). —MJ— Training Room 07:23, January 10, 2013 (UTC)
- The bot has been started. Due to the fact that over 18,000 articles use {{Ref}}, this will take some time, probably at least a couple of days. Although I normally shut my computer down when I go to bed, given the size of the task, I will likely let the bot run overnight in order to get this done faster. The regex has been tested quite thoroughly, but in the event it does break something and I'm not around, you can shut it down by editing its talk page redirect, as AutoWikiBrowser will automatically stop when it detects new messages. —MJ— Jedi Council Chambers 22:26, January 10, 2013 (UTC)