Template talk:Blue Mountains WHS

Template for approval: Template:Blue Mountains WHS

Swept in from the pub

I thought this template was an approved template, until I went to do a slight adjustment. Works similar to Template:EuropeanCuisines or Template:Asian cuisines and it's been in use for just a bit under six months without any issues. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 14:24, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

Seems OK. Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:30, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

This new style of template represents what the English Wikipedia calls "navboxes". They are just lists of links, very popular with editors who like to organize and cluster articles but of doubtful utility to travelers. They are useless to people using a print-out. Having the articles be useful for someone who printed out the article is one of the project's goals. I'm not sure that navboxes are compatible with that goal, as they provide no information except that there's an article online that you can't read because you printed out the page (or didn't download the other articles). That's particularly true for the "cuisine" articles. Perhaps if you are inside the Blue Mountains, you would want a bare list of all the parks there, but why would anyone in a particular country want a list of the kind of food they could be eating in a different country? WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:09, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing Maybe it's worth asking Yvwv who created the cuisine navboxes. I quite like them, as it makes it convenient to read similar articles to that subject or location, but maybe that's just me (because I find these convenient on Wikipedia). We do also have these on some of our US history articles too, like Mexican-American history or Presidents of the United States. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 09:54, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

For print-outs it should be easy to remove them by a device specification in CSS. For online use, I think they are aesthetically problematic. They could probably be redesigned to look nicer, and integrate better in the places where they are used. For usefulness: isn't this just what categories are for? Once upon the time there was a decision not to use categories in the normal user interface, but I think the situation now is quite different from then, as Wikipedia now is ubiquitous. I don't know how many Wikipedia readers are acquainted with them, though. –LPfi (talk) 10:14, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

While navboxes are mostly used for what to read next, at the end of articles, ours are at the beginning, to provide context. I am not convinced that they are optimal for that purpose, at least in their current shape. –LPfi (talk) 10:16, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

At least at the English Wikipedia, logged-out people view the category pages more often than logged-in people. (I had someone pull the page view numbers a couple of years, because I was curious.) The difference was great enough to suggest that categories were not only/primarily used by editors.

I believe that regular in-text links are the simplest and best way to help people navigate between articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 12:55, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ It could be done. If the size of this specific box is too big, then I suppose it could be condensed and look something like this:

I don't think this new one affects mobile view much (and it doesn't on mine), but I do realise it looks weird when printing. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 13:05, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

Why use this, and not add a plain old sentence to each article that says "There are eight national parks in the Greater Blue Mountains Area: Blue Mountains, Gardens of Stone, Kanangra-Boyd, Nattai, Thirlmere Lakes, Wollemi, Yengo, and Jenolan Caves." or (when you are writing the article about, e.g, Gardens of Stone, "There are seven other national parks in the Greater Blue Mountains Area: Blue Mountains, Kanangra-Boyd, Nattai, Thirlmere Lakes, Wollemi, Yengo, and Jenolan Caves." ? WhatamIdoing (talk) 13:18, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

If the Greater Blue Mountains Area is a region that makes sense to visitors, should it replace Blue Mountains? /Yvwv (talk) 12:40, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

I earlier too thought that the Blue Mountains and Greater Blue Mountains Area were the same, but upon further research that I did a few months ago, some of the parks like Nattai or Thirlmere Lakes are in the Southern Highlands (though arguably no-one talks about these parks so information is very limited, and most people who live in NSW have no idea about these parks.) while Yengo NP is in the Hunter. The state government categorises Nattai National Park as "Sydney and surrounds" which is not very helpful and the same with Thirlmere Lakes.

However, strangely, the Greater Blue Mountains does not include the mountain towns in the Blue Mountains, which to me sounds strange, but I think it was deliberately chosen as the name for the world-heritage area to prevent confusion with the Blue Mountains. I think we should just keep the Blue Mountains article for the region, while keeping the Greater Blue Mountains Area article as an extraregion to describe the world-heritage area. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 13:05, 28 April 2022 (UTC)