User talk:144.92.234.40

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Template:What era is

Hi! Thanks for you efforts on {{What era is}}. However, your edits appear to have broken the template. As this template is used by thousands of pages, this affects a lot of our content. When editing a heavily used template experimentally, please use the template's sandbox and testcase page. I have set these up for you at Template:What era is/sandbox and Template:What era is/testcases. When you have it working well there, you can move it to the main template page. Cheers, Inductiveload—talk/contribs 23:13, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

Hi, I don't know how to test category templates without actually doing it... In any case, it will be only for a short while, and can be reverted if this completely eludes me. I have made *some* improvements so far...

This template is used by every author page (over 10,000 pages IIRC), it is too heavily used to be broken without a fix in mind. You can test categories by using the Sandbox or creating your own at User:144.92.234.40/Sandbox. I do appreciate the effort, and it is a valuable fix, but you don't have to break the main template in the mean time. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 23:22, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

By the way, the template sandbox has been updated with the latest experimental version, and you can compare outputs on the testcase page. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 23:23, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

Where is the testcase page?

Template:What era is/testcases. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 23:52, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

But I can't test how the categories will come out in practice. I know it's heavy use, but the cats aren't working out now, either - every non-date is defaulting to "Ancient". I noticed this while trying to work on the ancient Greeks. I don't know if I can fix it entirely, but I've at least been able to get the unknown '?' dates to stop defaulting there.

{{Author}} applies the categories like this: [[Category:{{what era is|{{{birthyear}}}}} authors]] (and the same for death year). If you get the testcases working correctly, then the categories will follow automatically when the fixed template is inserted. Additionally, it's not good to hammer on a heavily used template with dozens of closely spaced edits if you can help it as the servers have to propagate the change to all pages. In fact, if you were going on the category behaviour only, you may have missed some changes as the server might not have updated that page yet. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 23:51, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

Inductiveload, thank you for taking a stab at this, but everything is still defaulting to "Ancient".

It seems to work as intended, there are very few mis-categorised authors in Category:Ancient authors, and the ones that are there are due to incorrect usage of the author template. If there is something there that is not a number or "?", then it defaults to ancient, as it assumes you have entered something like "343 BCE". If you put in something like "c. 1953", it will register as ancient. If you want to put something like "c. 1953" in the author template, leave the unknown birth/deathyear parameter blank and use the "dates" one instead. It's a hack, but templates aren't actually very good at string processing, as they are not a real programming language and are not very flexible. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 20:16, 1 February 2012 (UTC)