Template talk:Work in progress

Reserving an article?
I strongly dislike this template. I never noticed it before today; but it strikes me as very un-wiki like in trying to reserve an article for an unspecified amount of time for a single user to edit the article. The central concept of a wiki is that multiple authors can make edits. If a major re-write is being worked on, I would suggest either doing it in stages, by section; or create a draft re-write in a user space. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 11:14, 8 August 2006 (CDT)


 * I totally disagree. It is a great way to avoid having to steamroll smaller edits with a major one. It simply saves everyone a lot of grief that could result from multiple people doing the same major reworking in different ways at the same time. Noone likes to expend effort on something and then have it disappear minutes later because someone was reformatting the article in question and the intermediate edits are now moot. Also, politely asking people to not edit while reworking is in progress is in no way un-wiki; there's nothing stopping anyone from editing anything afterwards or even making comments during, as suggested by the template. -- [[Image:Bishop_icon2.png]] Bishop [ rap|con ] 12:27, 8 August 2006 (CDT)


 * My primary objection to it is that it's open-ended. While it may be reasonable to be used as you did, for a 30-minute change - there is nothing preventing it's use for several hours, weeks, or even months. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 12:34, 8 August 2006 (CDT)


 * Update: I just found on Wikipedia they have a similar template, and not surprisingly it had similar complaints about it. Their solution was a rewrite of the wording.  Let me try a change, and tell me if you agree with the new wording. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 12:35, 8 August 2006 (CDT)


 * I have mainly the same objections as they do on WP. If someone is paying attention, a note on the talk page does the same job. I think we only add the problems of having to check the edit history to figure out if the template is still in effect and having to remember to get rid of the template afterwards. --68.142.14.65 13:09, 8 August 2006 (CDT)
 * i'd like to refer to the anon by a real account name, but no ammount of pestering seems to be able to convince him to register. so either you edit the talk page, make your changes, and edit the talk page saying you're done (3 edits), or you paste this on and save, then change your article to the ideal (2 edits). i think it's a useful tool, i had this problem with a few builds that needed massive attention. --Honorable Sarah [[image:Honorable_Icon.gif]] 13:14, 8 August 2006 (CDT)

Proposed revision
WORK IN PROGRESS: A major edit is in progress for this article. As a courtesy, please do not edit this article while this message is displayed. If this article has not been edited within the last four hours, please remove this template. This message is intended to help reduce edit conflicts, and should be removed between editing sessions to allow others to improve the article.

Any thoughts on the proposed change? The "four hours" was just a random duration that I grabbed. Wikipedia uses "if it has not been edited recently", which seemed too vague and open to varying interpretations of how long qualified as "recent". --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 12:49, 8 August 2006 (CDT)
 * that's much politer. however, i think a varable time and a contact name might be useful, consider the following modification:

If this article has not been edited within the last, please contact user: and remove this template.
 * so the usage becomes . template syntax isn't my stongpoint, can you tell? --Honorable Sarah [[image:Honorable_Icon.gif]] 12:57, 8 August 2006 (CDT)
 * If using it that way, then I think that a better wording might be

If this article has not been edited within the last hour(s), please remove this template and notify user:.
 * This forces it to be a number of hours, rather than leaving open multiple days or longer. It also words it to allow immediate removal of the template, with just a courtesy notification to the user.
 * Another modification may be to use an if/then. If  is used, then show that duration, otherwise default to "two hours" (which seems more reasonable to me than my originally proposed four hours).  The usage would then be either  or  --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 13:04, 8 August 2006 (CDT)
 * i'm happy with that. i wrote Team - "Steel Wall" Deep Group in almost exactly two hours, granted it was horrifically ugly, but it shows how much text can be poured in that time. that seems like a reasonable time frame. --Honorable Sarah [[image:Honorable_Icon.gif]] 13:14, 8 August 2006 (CDT)

New draft
Sorry I had to leave in the middle of this discussion yesterday. :) I fully agree that the usefulness of this template is only to prevent edit-conflicts in the short term, certainly not to reserve an article for anyone for an extended period of time. As for exactly how to implement it, there's no need for if-then's (which is hellla complicated) we can simply use a default value for the variable.

Since the template isn't in use at the moment, I'm going to simply make the nessecary changes to it. Feel free to correct or yell at me later if it is not what you wanted (but I think we basically all agree on its use by now). -- Bishop [ rap|con ] 23:23, 8 August 2006 (CDT)