User talk:Moviesign/Template:State

Remove Template
Are there any States that cannot also be treated as Locations? Can we merge this template with Location? Thoughts? Concerns? &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 02:31, December 3, 2014 (UTC)

Still wondering if anyone has any input on this. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 17:59, April 6, 2015 (UTC)


 * Movie, I have been wondering about this for ages... I vote we remove the States template... too confusing. - Darkwynters (talk) 21:30, April 21, 2015 (UTC)

Well, a State is a political thing and only incidentally a Location. If I move the missing parts of this template into Location, will it make that template too cumbersome? I'll play around with it and give folks a chance to vote on it. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 00:48, April 22, 2015 (UTC)


 * What I might suggest is a sort of object-oriented outlook for something like this. We could code up the templates so that State used and expanded the core information found in Location. Does that make sense? ~ Lhynard (talk) 01:00, April 22, 2015 (UTC)


 * Yes, I'm looking into making one template a pass-through to the other, or combining them if the differences aren't too great. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 02:29, April 22, 2015 (UTC)

Things that will probably change. Speak up if you disagree or have suggestions. There may be more as I dig deeper. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 14:14, April 22, 2015 (UTC)
 * "Area" renamed to "Region" to avoid confusion with "Size".
 * "Allegiances" moved from Society section to Political section.
 * Renamed "Rulers" to "Heads of State"
 * Moved ruler1–5 and rulertable to the History section
 * Removed "Succeeded by" and perhaps "Preceded by", as they will be handled by the rulertable
 * EDIT: Nope, these are actually for the State that preceded/followed the subject of the article, not rulers.
 * Moving Population history to the History section.
 * Combining "Founded" and "Established".
 * Combining "Destroyed" and "Disestablished".
 * "Ruler's Type" or "Head of State"? I like Head of State.
 * Events/rulers are "normally" on the left with dates on the right for Locations, but State did it in reverse. Compare Waterdeep with Silverymoon. Keep it that way?


 * Okay, the first pass is about done. See User:Moviesign/Waterdeep for a test page with somewhat bogus data. I tried combining the templates so that Location took all the parameters that State used, with the modifications noted above (and please comment on the questions raised). Now is the time to give your suggestion and express your opinions, before the ink dries. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 04:49, April 23, 2015 (UTC)


 * Hey, the main reaosn I used state for the Free Cities of the Vilhon Reach page was the Largest city parameter. If this could be added to location then state would be redundant as far as I'm concerned. -Thomas Love http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/jackass/images/5/5f/Star_tiny.png [ talk ] 16:22, September 20, 2015 (UTC)

Combining Location and State
This is a call for comments on what the combined template should look like. WARNING: the template has not been converted to the new portable infobox style, so the final look maybe slightly different. Please limit the discussion to the names of the fields, where they are positioned, the headers for each group, new fields, etc. What we decide will determine how much clean-up might be necessary to get all our Locations having a consistent look. I have set up a demo to compare old/new Location templates which can be viewed here. Click "Re-roll" to select a different Location at random.

Since there are less than 20 pages that use the State template, you can see what they look like by editing them and replacing " " with " " and then preview (please don't save your change).

Things that have changed (update of the list above):
 * All parameters in State are now included in Location, although they may be presented differently.
 * "Area" renamed to "Region" to avoid confusion with "Size".
 * Between "Established" and "Founded" I went with "Established".
 * Between "Disestablished" and "Destroyed" I went with "Disestablished".
 * "Allegiances" moved from Society section to Political section. (It was misnamed "allegiance" in the Usage documentation, which means there may be some broken infoboxes now.)
 * Movied population1–5 and popyear1–5 to the History section
 * Plain population remains in the Society section
 * Moved ruler1–5, ruleryear1–5, and rulertable to the History section
 * Plain ruler and rulertype remain in the Political section.
 * A new "Commercial information" section has been added to hold currency, imports, and exports.
 * I'm going to add a populationtable so folks can use a Split table just like they can for rulertable.

The idea was to keep the quick summary near the top of the infobox and push the long historical information down to the bottom. This will cause some pages to look strange because some people filled out ruler1 and ruleryear1 instead of using just ruler and rulertype. Same for population1 and population.

The presentation of dates is not consistent in all cases. The ruler1–5 and population1–5 tack on "In date DR" to the end, whereas the event1–4 table lists dates on the left and the events on the right. Do we want to keep it this way? Be aware that the left-hand column is normally for labels and is set to "nowrap", so you have to put &lt;br /&gt; tags in if you want something to wrap to the next line. Left-hand data that is too long can cause the right-hand column to be squished (wrapping is allowed in the right-hand column).

That's all I can think of at the moment. Please view some pages make comments and suggestions. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 17:45, September 21, 2015 (UTC)