Template talk:Smallcaps

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Smallcaps template.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

This template was considered for deletion on 2008 December 2. The result of the discussion was "keep".

Deletion

This purely-presentational template is purportedly for "name/surname disambiguation in lead sections, and all-caps words or pronounceable acronyms", but none of those require small caps and in few cases would it seem to be desirable. We shouldn't encourage users to experiment with presentational markup like this by having templates for it. It should be deleted. I'll renom assuming that there's no counter-argument. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 16:01, 1 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

{{editprotected}}
The deletion notice is defacing dozens of articles. Since the discussion is clearly heading for a keep, please remove the notice (and speedy close the discussion).--Kotniski (talk) 14:19, 4 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Done — {{Nihiltres|talk|log}} 19:18, 4 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Purpose of this template

Now that the TfD has been closed (and the term "speedy keep" bandied about without people apparently having read what that entails), discussion will need to continue here. In the TfD, the following points where made:

The markup is useful for templates, including pronunciation guidelines;
It is inappropriately used.

As such, I'd like to clarify where and when it should be used. Right now the documentation says "You can most especially use this template for name/surname disambiguation in lead sections, and all-caps words or pronounceable acronyms". This obviously isn't right: the MoS encourages users not to overuse markup, and so we should not be encouraging its use willy-nilly.

I propose updating the documentation to say the following:

Ideally, it should only be used in templates;
It should not be used for any of the old reasons: name/surname disambiguation using capitalisation is uncommonly-used in English-speaking territories, and it is excessive markup in the other two cases.

Furthermore, instances in which is is used for inappropriate reasons in articles should be removed. Suggestions? Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 12:52, 5 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've now updated the documentation to reflect this. I'll go through transclusions and remove inappropriate ones later. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 12:46, 11 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

So now the lead says not to use it for family names, and the #Reasons to use section says to use it for that purpose. This contradiction should be resolved. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:46, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved, by removing the invalid examples. Cheers. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 08:52, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Back to usage - it suggests this should be used sparingly but then the Feb 2012 changes give a whole host of examples which seem to suggest it could be used a lot. (Emperor (talk) 00:39, 18 October 2012 (UTC))[reply]

Adding a classname

{{editprotected}} Can we add a classname to this, so that (a) people who want to override the formatting can do so in their user CSS and (b) we can move the inline style declaration into the core stylesheets (which is better coding practice).

Please replace the current content with:

<span class="smallcaps" style="font-variant:small-caps;">{{{1}}}</span><noinclude>
{{documentation}}<!-- PLEASE ADD DOCUMENTATION/CATEGORIES/INTERWIKIS TO THE /doc SUBPAGE, THANKS--></noinclude>

, where the only edit, thus, is the insertion of class="smallcaps". This will have no inadvertent side-effects.

Thanks! — OwenBlacker (Talk) 14:47, 3 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(a)

Done (b) you have to understand that we have a LOT of css. In general styling that is used on as "relatively" few pages as this case, are not added to the global css. This is because the increased size of the global css page, downloaded for all users for all pages, would be a bigger disadvantage, than increased page sizes for a few articles downloaded by a few people. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:20, 3 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Redundant code. The smallcaps class is set to font-variant:small-caps, so you are essentially putting the same style code in the span twice. There is no need to use both. Since the class can be modified by user CSS, but inline styles cannot, here is what it should be:

~~<span class="smallcaps">{{{1}}}</span><noinclude>~~

—Telpardec TALK 21:25, 9 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Are you sure this does not interfere with the current TfD re {{smallcaps all}}? -DePiep (talk) 23:37, 9 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry. I didn't pay close attention to the part b comment of User:TheDJ above. The class was added to the template, but not defined in the global.css file. I tried using the class by itself, and there was no change, so it is not redundant. And now that I think about it, the class does not need to be defined, since its purpose is to provide a hook for the user's style sheet to latch onto and it becomes defined in the user css.—Telpardec TALK 21:21, 13 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Poor typography

What's the point of this? In the default sans-serif font for Safari/Mac (Helvetica), this template makes the text aesthetically and functionally worse. The small capitals are about a half-pixel too short, and their strokes much too light. The authors' names look mismatched, and are less readable. It comes across like someone's using typographic effects to ape print publishing just because they can, without the necessary consideration or skill to do it right. It's a disservice to the reader. —Michael Z. 2010-06-16 03:17 z

In Firefox/Mac the small caps' height is good, but the strokes still very light. The small caps look less out of place than in Safari, but the entire Reference section's text looks about a pixel smaller, and overall readability is about the same. —Michael Z. 2010-06-16 03:28 z

Turkish İ

İzmir will be written İzmi̇r in small caps. --84.62.201.164 (talk) 15:34, 15 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Introducing `{{smallcaps all}}`

Please take a look at the new {{smallcaps all}} template. If there are no tresholds I missed, we can start promoting & using it. I got the idea for this solution from this edit by Kwami. -DePiep (talk) 13:35, 25 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Edit request (25 March 2012)

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

Please remove the shouting. The template is protected from editing, even by me -- who to be afraid of? To be clear: remove the text, not just lowercase it. -DePiep (talk) 19:50, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Not done: please be more specific about what needs to be changed. Which text, exactly, are you requesting be removed? Anomie ⚔ 22:15, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Found it - it was the text in a comment that's only visible on the edit screen. I replaced it with the standard text telling you to use /doc to make life easier for people who do need to add categories etc. Tra (Talk) 22:27, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I saw that. But the request was "remove the text, not just lowercase it", which seems odd to request for the standard editor's comment used with {{documentation}}. Anomie ⚔ 22:59, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Eh, Anomie "I saw that", what did you not see and why did you not see that re my request? -DePiep (talk) 23:10, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Even worse and as simple as this:: if you do not understand it, dear declining admin Anomie, just ask for more information. -DePiep (talk) 23:18, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Anomie did ask for more information - it's normal to deactivate the request whilst doing so in order that the queue doesn't get filled up with loads of requests that can't be actioned. But in any case, I wouldn't worry about it too much - it doesn't even show up anywhere apart from the edit screen. Tra (Talk) 23:34, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

So Anomie declined my request to shorten the queue? Realy? -DePiep (talk) 23:41, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Could be phrased better, not? Needs more time. -DePiep (talk) 00:04, 26 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Self edit correction. -DePiep (talk) 00:26, 26 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Legal citation

You may wish to consider adding a section. According to the Bluebook of Legal Citations, law journal cites should be in small caps, as in 69 Yale L.J. 1 (1969). Magazines, such as Fortune are cited similarly and books as well, as in Gone With the Wind. PraeceptorIP (talk) 21:27, 23 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Would it be possible to add to the Wiki markup section an entry comparable to <(ref>|</ref)>, that upon clicking would put in the (smallcaps|) template, so that you could just type in the appropriate terms after the | ?

PraeceptorIP (talk) 21:36, 23 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Bad substitution

Matt Fitzpatrick, this template has been substituted 3 times since it was converted to templatestyles, all 3 in SportingFlyer signature. per WP:TemplateStyles (In templates intended to be substituted, use inline CSS instead of TemplateStyles), do we need to add some {{issubst}} or Module:Unsubst logic to avoid this problem? Frietjes (talk) 17:01, 23 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Frietjes: as an aside, do I need to take any action? SportingFlyer talk 21:38, 23 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- SportingFlyer, I will see if I can get a bot to fix the places where your signature left a <templatestyles>...</templatestyles> behind. it might be safer if you change the {{subst:smallcaps|[[User talk:SportingFlyer|talk]]}} in your signature to <span style="font-variant:small-caps">[[User talk:SportingFlyer|talk]]</span>. that way you won't be dependent on changes to how this template substitutes, while still having smallcaps. as an example, I fixed your signature above. Frietjes (talk) 14:06, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  - @Frietjes: Cheers, I've updated my signature. Sorry it became a problem! SportingFlyer talk 23:50, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like a good idea. I'll set up a sandbox, then work on it overnight. Matt Fitzpatrick (talk) 01:16, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I added a quick and dirty {{ifsubst}} (diff). Hope that does the trick. Matt Fitzpatrick (talk) 03:33, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Matt Fitzpatrick, I don't know if there will be any adverse effects from having a larger "expansion size" on pages with many uses of this template. we shall see. Frietjes (talk) 14:06, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The changes break existing uses, e.g. User:Godsy/KIS. The version that stood from March 25, 2012‎ to October 23, 2018‎ is seemingly much simpler and superior. Please revert the breaking changes. Perhaps just leaving this template alone and creating a new one for those wishing to use the "templatestyle" version would be a good solution. — Godsy^(TALK_CONT) 17:22, 10 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

so one broken page? seems easy to fix by substitution like this. Frietjes (talk) 18:00, 10 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

As it broke my page, it likely broke some of the other 17,000 pages that transclude this template. Additionally, no reasons have been presented to make a convenient, longstanding template harder to use. — Godsy^(TALK_CONT) 18:07, 10 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

it is unlikely that it broke many of the other pages, since the change was made in October and there have been no comments until your comment now. the bug is when templatestyles are used inside of a wikilink, which is something that should be fixed in the backend mediawiki server. a simple insource search shows that there are fewer than 40 articles using this template inside of wikilink text. Frietjes (talk) 19:12, 10 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Glycolysis

In the above article, the TemplateStyle doesn't seem to get included as intended when the following is invoked:

 {{Biochem reaction subunit|compound={{sm|d}}-Glucose|link=Glucose|image=D-glucose wpmp.svg}}

The parser (?) has the selected output:

 <a href="/enwiki/wiki/Glucose" title="Glucose"><style data-mw-deduplicate="TemplateStyles:r920966791">?'"`UNIQ--templatestyles-00000009-QINU`"'?</style><span class="smallcaps">d</span>-Glucose</a>

There don't seem to be any javascript errors, or interactions with local browser extensions.

89.107.6.24 (talk) 01:44, 2 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Inconsistent with Greek

@Frietjes: I used this template at Phonetic Symbol Guide for the non-Unicode symbol small-cap delta. There was no effect however. With the full unaccented Greek alphabet, half the letters are supported and half are not: αβγδεζηθικλμνξοπρσςτυφχψωϝ. — kwami (talk) 06:11, 28 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

User:Kwamikagami, all this template does is wrap the text in a span with font-variant: small-caps. how that gets transformed depends on your browser. I would suggest asking at WP:VPT or MediaWiki talk:Common.css or a location where people who know more about css, browsers, etc. are watching. Frietjes (talk) 16:06, 28 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Frietjes. I'll try there. — kwami (talk) 21:04, 28 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Unaccountable failure

For some reason, use of {{smallcaps|qwerty}} failed at the Template:Legifrance/doc page, in this revision. I've added a CSS workaround for now (diff) so the current revision of the /doc page is fine, but I don't understand why this version failed.

Here is a snippet of the page html surrounding the 'smallcaps' issue.
To make it easier to use this template with <a href="/enwiki/wiki/QWERTY" title="QWERTY">English <style data-mw-deduplicate="TemplateStyles:r920966791">?'"`UNIQ--templatestyles-00000005-QINU`"'?</style><span class="smallcaps">qwerty</span> keyboards</a>,

I'm not familiar with the classes and templates styles, but I suspect there may be a clue to the problem in there somewhere. Izno, you're kind of the styles and classes guru; do you see anything obvious, here? Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 23:45, 26 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot, this is phab:T200704. Izno (talk) 23:48, 26 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T200704

Izno, Thanks! Not sure if this would be a helpful clue for the ticket, but when I pasted the entire content of the "#Note on spelling" section from the failing version into ExpandTemplates, it rendered properly, so perhaps it's interacting with something on the /doc page? (Do you generally subscribe? If so, I'll stop pinging.) Mathglot (talk) 23:52, 26 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot, no, even if I did, pinging is fine. More notification better than less.

Hmm, I'm not seeing a second link, so the jump to that bug being the exact bug is maybe wrong. I don't think anything has changed in this area in the parser (for the same reason that this task is even still open to begin with). I anticipate it's the same cause though. I'm honestly kind of flabbergasted because it half-expanded the TemplateStyles tag but didn't remove the marker.... @SSastry (WMF), do you know what could have made this totally break from how it used to function (which is as described in the bug)? (I see the task got a note.) Izno (talk) 00:03, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

(It's also not the {{ifsubst}} being a problem as this edit demonstrates.) Izno (talk) 00:05, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for that. Just a note to Izno and any other users that may need a live page for testing, this is a /doc page of a very low-usage template, so feel free to play with the page as needed, to generate and test theories. I'll lurk and watch with interest. Mathglot (talk) 00:15, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Nothing has changed as far as I know. I expect it is the same bug. -- T200704#4691337 seems to indicate this bug is also present for the first link. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 02:35, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

On an aside, I don't think this is a reasonable use of smallcaps. Even the article on QWERTY does not use that styling anywhere. It is not an initialism, even though it's pronounced as Qwerty, as some British styles guides might like to style things. Izno (talk) 00:08, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You may be right about that; I had initially tried it as all-caps (as the QWERTY article has it), and it just looked wrong to me in context. But this is small potatoes now, compared to the phab issue; if the style requires alteration per guidelines, I'm fine with that. Mathglot (talk) 00:15, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Poor practice to use a deprecated example (AD, BC, CE, BCE)

At present, the documentation says Smallcaps should not be used for the abbreviations BC, AD, BCE, CE, etc., per MOS:ERA, even though they are used in the examples below.. This is poor practice: it could be avoided by using a legitimate example like AM and PM.

I'd just correct it except that I daren't touch even the documentation of such a heavily-used template. Would someone else care to do it? 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 15:53, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]