Template talk:Coverstory

This template should link to the place we discuss "best of rationalwiki", since that's the cat that gets articles on the front page (well, my sandbox version, anyway) human 19:00, 19 January 2008 (EST)

Ignore the above. By the way, if the "character break" occurs in a header, the equals signs end up looking funny on the main page. human 14:08, 24 January 2008 (EST)

I've reduced it to only show 300 characters - personally, I prefer the way this makes the Main Page look, and it gives more room for other items. Anyone object? DogP 22:03, 13 April 2008 (EDT)

Yeah, that's way too little. Keep reloading the template and see how some articles just don't really get "going":

"Non-materialist neuroscience is the latest front in the war on science. The battle has been a long time coming and it is surprising it has taken so long to get going. Modern neuroscience is rapidly reducing much of human thought,"

I think 300 is way to low - some articles will eat most of that up with "noincluded" templates and images. Wanna go for something higher, like 750? human 22:13, 13 April 2008 (EDT)

I take the view that a very brief overview of the article is all that's required on the Main Page - and your example above seems perfect to me, in fact it's too long - the work is done by the second full stop, and the reader knows what the article is going to be. I don't see any point taking up valuable Main page real estate with article abstracts - hell, the reader should just go read the article, and it shouldn't take more than two sentences to pull them in. The precis <noinclude> option may be the ideal answer though, and I'm happy to help out with that - it won't take forever. DogP 12:42, 14 April 2008 (EDT)

Alternatively the dpl could be amended to pull out a marked (invisibly) section and put that on t' main page.   ^Contribs_Talk 12:50, 14 April 2008 (EDT)

I think Susan's "includeonly" idea is what is needed. Then dpl can be an upper limit of 1k characters, say, but each article will be carefully "includeonlied" to pick what is needed to provide a nice precis. The tags can even work around clumsy headers, etc., or use text that is not the intro section of an article. As far as a "hidden" chunk, isn't that a lot more work? I say, let's pick one at random and "includeonly" it, and work through them. The dpl will still work as written, so there's no hassle in getting it all done at the same time. Oh, and we'd have to edit the instructions somewhere for the future... By the way, the next example I saw was far worse @ 300. But although the "characters" thing worked after a fashion, I do think that changing to "includeonly" will be far, far better. human 13:05, 14 April 2008 (EDT)

Whoops, what was I thinking? "Includeonly" makes the tagged section disappear from the article. "Noinclude" would work fine, though. Just use it to cut off the transclusion at a nice logical point, if possible. human 13:10, 14 April 2008 (EDT)

I've bumped it up to 1000, and will continue in the morning when my internet is less shite. Aylesburymartin (totnesmartin's "bot" account) 17:48, 13 February 2009 (EST)

Problem

I just noticed a display problem when Expelled:Leader's Guide is selected as the cover story. It comes up with a space at the beginning of a line before the "→ read the entire article" link. This turns it into a monospaced text box. Генгис^{Is the Pope a Catholic?} 19:38, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll look into it -- Nx / talk 19:48, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Have we built a pair of sandboxes for testing coverstory layouts yet? One would be a copy of the main page, but with a sandbox template instead of coverstory, and the sandbox template could simply be edited to "force" a given article to appear. I think Pi recently said he had one on his userspace once? ħuman 19:55, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

(ec) Ok, I somehow fixed it by moving back the custom toc from the template. The whole coverstory system however is a complete mess. -- Nx / talk 19:56, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

If you can fix it then please go right ahead. :) Генгис^{Is the Pope a Catholic?} 19:59, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

I proposed an alternative waaay back here, to include the lead section or if the article doesn't have a lead section, a special section that's only visible on the main page. -- Nx / talk 20:07, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

There are lots of different ways we could fix it, the biggest glaring problem is the "character counting" that the dpl does counts noincluded characters. We could just go to an "includeonly" system, where the lead is tweaked to fit the main page nicely... ħuman 23:16, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

We could also go to using subpages or special pages to transclude. But I think that makes for unnecessary complexity. ħuman 23:19, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

<sulk>"The whole coverstory system however is a complete mess"</sulk> ^{I am eating} _& honey^chat 23:24, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Here is the testing area were you can see them all. - π 00:17, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks... yeah, we really need to at least switch to using noinclude to pick what is transcluded, the character counter thing was a great idea, but doesn't work well. They really shouldn't break off mid-sentence on the main page... ħuman 00:23, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

The problem is that DPL does not take noinclude into account, and counts it into the character limit. Also, our version is not as good at cleaning up after the cut, e.g. it can't handle tables with the html tags, only wikicoded tables. The latest version does that nicely, but has other problems that prevent me from installing it. -- Nx / talk 07:31, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Improvement

The dpl query is a bit overkill since we don't add new cover stories too often. To avoid running the query each and every time the main page is shown, we can use the randomselection extension to choose an article instead, and a substed dpl query to generate the list for the randomselection. For example: Template:Coverstory/sandbox contains a dpl query that can be substed using subst:expand ({{subst:expand:Template:Coverstory/sandbox}}) to produce Template:Coverstory/testcases. -- Nx / talk 16:28, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Good idea. ħuman 21:17, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Images

Wouldn't it be a good idea to have the images featured on Main as part of the cover stories be in the articles themselves? I like the image thing (visual learning), but it's a bit confusing and inconsistent. (I know, small mind.) sterile spoon 23:09, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Sure, why not? Mostly they are from the articles, but sometimes work on the synopsis is so separate it doesn't get added to the article itself. ħuman 02:16, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Should be in most cases. Some aren't - I just put "The Creation of Adam" from the creationnav sidebar on the blurb for Young Earth creationism because it's the best available, same for the Noah's Ark painting on the blurb for Baraminology. The main page blurb and the article intro should also be much the same, but sometimes they aren't, and sometimes that's fine - they're different writing for different purposes - David Gerard (talk) 11:31, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

And in those cases the image is in the article via the template, correct? ħuman 17:58, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Yuh. Which is close enough. I'm not obsessing about making sure the template image is in the article or vice versa, or that the blurb text and article lede are substantially identical - they're just guidelines in the greater cause of TOTAL WORLD DOMINATION - David Gerard (talk) 21:40, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Indeed. ħuman 03:55, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

I just saw the broken link to Holocaust denial.

Is it a cache issue? Narky Sawtooth (BoN is paranoid!) 22:10, 27 February 2015 (UTC)