Forum:Let's talk about other template things
I suggest that anyone interested should watch this page where I'll be putting my intents in regards to template edits. Editors should know about this sooner rather than later, because changes to templates can easily be breaking.
Properties w/out automatic formatting[edit]
Right now I want to have alternatives to the properties who's contents have automatic formatting, such as italics and links. Take Template:LoreQuote: the "game" and "book" properties are automatically italicized and linked. This makes it difficult to use our other templates we already have for those fields, such as {{Ultima IV}}. Furthermore, the assumption that the source was always a book broke Beggars. So, I saw two choices:
- Change the templates, then get a bot to correct all the contents in all the articles, putting italics and links where necessary (thus all these markup changes would [hopefully] be visually neutral)
- Add properties which had the same purpose as the automatically formatted ones, but w/out that automatic formatting.
I went w/#2. So you can still use "game" if you like, but you can also use "gameU" and provide whatever formatting you want yourself. You can also still use "book" but you can also use "sourceU" (renamed for situations where the source isn't a book). The beauty of this is that you can still use the old properties the same way you always did, and expect the same results. But if you want the power of which automation robbed you, you have that, too.
I intend those expand these unformatted options to other templates. The Ultra-Mind (talk) 22:07, 21 January 2020 (UTC)