Template talk:Ambox

Standardising cleanup box formatting
I've made a proposal regarding standardisation of the way cleanup templates are laid out. Please add comments and suggestions there. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 15:13, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Ambox/float overlapping in Opera
Resolved.

As seen on this article, the ambox ends up overlapping a Wiktionary float (evidently only in Opera). This problem is tied to the order of templates inserted in the article, does not occur with a Imbox, and appears not to affect the second ambox in an article (for whatever reason). Can whatever makes Imbox work correctly be ported to ambox? –  7 4   17:41, 5 February 2009 (UTC)


 * First of all: Thanks for such a clear bug report.
 * Secondly: Yes, that is a known problem with the current margin top and bottom code used for the ambox. Ambox has the same problem with all kinds of right and left floating objects, such as images and other boxes.
 * The amboxes stack tightly on top of each other and that causes problems with the border and margin between them. We discussed this at MediaWiki talk:Common.css/Archive 5 last summer and tested a lot of code versions, without finding a solution that worked perfectly in all browsers. Unfortunately some time after that discussion someone changed the code to one of the more broken versions. Unfortunately I have been too busy elsewhere to handle that. The current broken version of the code is in MediaWiki:Common.css and looks like this:


 * It's on my to-do list to investigate that again.
 * The solution I prefer would be to do like we did with the cmbox. It used to stack tight and have the same problems. But we changed it to have some space between when stacked, just like all the other mboxes. Thus no problem at all. Here is an example how it would look with amboxes:


 * I think that looks better than tight stacking. And as was the real reason for the change in cmbox: It makes it clearer where the border between two boxes are when there are big boxes with lots of text in.
 * --David Göthberg (talk) 02:27, 6 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Alright; sorry to bother you with a known bug (I admit I didn't make it very far searching through the archives). For what (little) it's worth, your proposed solution sounds good to me. Thanks for the explanation (and all the hard work too!). –  7 4   03:06, 6 February 2009 (UTC)


 * No, it is I who should be sorry that we haven't fixed this yet, in spite that we have known about it for such a long time.
 * We are now discussing and testing possible solutions over at MediaWiki talk:Common.css. And which of the two possible solutions we should choose. More opinions are welcome over there.
 * --David Göthberg (talk) 02:56, 31 March 2009 (UTC)


 * ✅ Done - We have now fixed this by adding the following code to MediaWiki:Common.css:


 * All glory go to TheDJ who came up with the solution.
 * --David Göthberg (talk) 15:05, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Need it be so tall?
For templates with one line of text such as cleanup, there is twice as much empty space in the box than there is text. Is this level of padding really necessary? Skomorokh 04:10, 10 February 2009 (UTC)


 * First of all, if you only see one line of text in cleanup then you are using a higher screen resolution than most users. Most of us see two lines in that box.
 * Secondly, what causes the height your seeing is the size of the image in the box. Ambox only uses 2px of padding above and below the image. Decreasing to 1px or 0px looks really bad. 2px really is not much padding. And making the image smaller would make it too small, especially for people like you who use high screen resolutions.
 * So, try lowering your screen resolution to say 1024x768 and you'll see why these boxes are designed the way they are.
 * --David Göthberg (talk) 10:00, 10 February 2009 (UTC)


 * It's also worth pointing out that even on high-res displays cleanup is rather an exception; most ambox templates use two lines. I'd considered adding wording to cleanup to take it to two lines but didn't think it was appropriate in the end. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 22:53, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Metadata class

 * This discussion was moved here from David's talk page since it probably also will be interesting for other users. --David Göthberg (talk) 10:04, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Hello, I'm an admin in vi.wiki, could I ask you a question? I saw that in mbox templates, there is metadata param in class. It works well in en.wiki but when I import it to vi.wiki, it didn't show up until I deleted that parameter. Can you tell where should I do to make metadata class work in vi.wiki? Please notice me if you respond, thank you. Vinhtantran (talk) 17:02, 9 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Hi Vinhtantran. Well, the noprint/metadata classes are (or at least were when I last checked some months ago) a mess here at the English Wikipedia. And those classes are not standardised across the different language versions of Wikipedia. What the metadata class here at the English Wikipedia currently does is to hide whatever is marked with it when a page is printed to paper. But that wasn't even its original meaning here. And as you noticed it has different meaning on different Wikipedias. (So, that means that article message boxes built with the ambox is not visible when printing a page here at the English Wikipedia. We have decided that the article message boxes are unnecessary information when printing to paper, so we want to save people some paper and printing cartridges.)
 * So for now my best advice is to simply remove the "metadata" class from the ambox when you port it to another language Wikipedia, just as you say you already did.
 * --David Göthberg (talk) 10:04, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Left-aligned small ambox
We are about to add a "small=left" parameter that will make ambox show as a small left-aligned box.

See Template talk:Expand-section for the style discussion.

See Template talk:Mbox for the technical discussion.

--David Göthberg (talk) 05:06, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

On Commons
If anyone would like to help a similar transition I'm organizing on Commons, feel free to help. ViperSnake151  Talk 02:38, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Background
What, if any, consensus has been established in general, about which messages in article space should be using one of these standard boxes? Is it recognised that some messages are not suitable in this format?

I'm just looking for some background as I just had an edit reverted on Template:Expand list, which I had converted to a small ambox. Thanks, &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:20, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Don't know if there is a standard. But I do agree that this edit was not an improvement. From a small message to readers it changed to a bigger in your face navbox. Garion96 (talk) 09:09, 26 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I don't think there's anything like a consensus here. Myself, personally, I think the change was for the better.  By putting editorial remarks in message boxes, we make clearer the distinction between something that's part-of-the-article (like a "see also" link) and something that's about-the-article-itself.  Others obviously disagree.  There's always been some dynamic tension on Wikipedia over the prominence of editorial remarks.  At one end you have people who want them to be obvious, with the argument that it's part of the wiki nature to invite everybody to be an editor; at the other end of you have people who want them hidden except for active editors, with the argument that the primary purpose of the project is to be an encyclopedia, and it doesn't serve the reader to wallpaper articles with notices.  With other positions along the spectrum between.  I suspect we'll never have universal agreement on this.  — DragonHawk (talk|hist) 17:23, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
 * True, I am more in the camp of "doesn't serve the reader to wallpaper articles with notices". :) But besides that, this tag looks to be more in line with a stub notice. Which also is not in a navbox. Garion96 (talk) 17:52, 26 April 2009 (UTC)