I am going to advocate for the complete removal of T:Novel, T:Book, and any other of that type of template, completely. For any given article, it's fairly obvious whether the article is derived from a certain source or type of source; as well, we've always used citation to provide where the information in the article comes from. The banners are silly given that holds true. Further, the banners were instigated a long time ago when Manual of Monsters came out, and there was a whole fuss about appendix 3. That situation is no longer an issue. For any given section, it should similarly be obvious, either by inline citation or by the section name or by the first line of the section.
There is a second set of templates similar to the former set that I believe also merits removal: T:Cat, T:WotLK-section, and such, for the same reasons. For example, take Deathwing#Deepholm. We have T:Cat there. But the use there is redundant to the citation later in the sentence and takes up room for no apparent reason. Deathwing#Wrath of the Lich King is the same; we have a section title... and then we have a notice that says "here, here is information from Wrath of the Lich King. How repetitive. These templates are for their entirety, unneeded.
I do, however, think the first subset of these "notice" templates (T:RPG and such) are helpful on File pages, and would not object to keeping them there. I also believe that the templates T:WotLK-inline and co. are also of use only where they are currently used (adding these and removing -section is not what I'm shooting for and I would hate for that to be an unintended consequence), though I think in might be prudent to tone their usage down (as to the best way to do that, I'm not sure).
Thoughts? --Sky (t · c) 17:51, May 25, 2010 (UTC)
- I think they're fine. Mostly, because they help identify unique content. For example, a RPG character. If he's only mentioned in the RPG, then it's worth knowing he's 100% RPG. Same for novels, manga and comics.
- As for having the templates in the pages of those books, I think it's fine, too because it helps identifying if it's a novel/manga/comic/rpg/undefined book in a first sight.
- Also, as you said, these templates are great for images taken from the books, providing a visible tag so you only need to open its page to see where it came from.
- In the other side, for those related to WoW expansions, I think they aren't useful, because the game is too open and, eventually, they won't have an unique source. I think "exp-section" is enough. Anyway, I don't see any tag save the ones from Cata around, and I think they're fine until Cata is released. After that, I think they're pointless.--Lon-ami (talk) 18:37, May 25, 2010 (UTC)
- You don't see any of the others except the ones I pointed out to you, right? :P I don't think they're useful anywhere, and I especially don't think we need to replace them with one, all-inclusive template.
Content doesn't need to be unique, and in particular, it's obvious from the infobox if nothing else that the content is unique (or identifiable at first glance). We don't need to provide the reader with "oh, this is different"; they can decide that for themselves. As for id'ing, the infobox does that well enough (and the first line of the article should be able to do the same thing, without a need for a big template…). --Sky (t · c) 18:48, May 25, 2010 (UTC)
- You don't see any of the others except the ones I pointed out to you, right? :P I don't think they're useful anywhere, and I especially don't think we need to replace them with one, all-inclusive template.