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Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2011 September 18

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September 18

Template:Largest shopping centres in the United Kingdom (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

Non-encyclopaedic open-ended classification with no criteria for inclusion or exclusion, and no references for those included. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 23:39, 18 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Navboxes do not normally contain statements likely to be challenged; this one does. Anyway, if it is useful and to be kept, I suggest it should be renamed, and the criteria for inclusion made clear. Wikipedia does not have articles on Greatest ice-cream flavours of all time or Some rather large trees I saw in the woods one day, nor templates with comparable names. A title such as "UK shopping centres over x0000 square metres" would, I believe, be preferable; or perhaps call it "UK shopping centres" and put the inclusion criteria as above-text? Would that work? Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 21:57, 23 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
How about something like '25 (or another number to be agreed)' largest shopping centres in the United Kingdom'?Rangoon11 (talk) 22:09, 23 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
'Trophy boxes' is a wholly subjective comment and there are large numbers of templates which address the 'largest' of a topic where to be definitive would be impractical, unnecessary or both. A navbox on the, say, 25 largest shopping centres in the UK, or on those above, say, 1 million sq ft, is completely within policy and also of use to readers (there are no doubt thousands of shopping centres in the UK, but the very large ones, such as Bluewater or the Metro Centre, are clearly of far wider interest than the average or the smallest, almost all of which wont even have WP articles). This navbox can very easily be fixed in such a way.Rangoon11 (talk) 23:06, 24 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I don't believe I actually commented on the selection criteria, though I certainly agree they're arbitrary, and that that's not a good sign. Since you asked, WP:CLN suggests that good navboxes have the following properties: "The subject of the template should be mentioned in every article" and "The articles should refer to each other, to a reasonable extent." Neither is the case here. Powers T 13:09, 25 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The articles will (or should) state something like 'is one of the largest shopping centres in the UK', 'is the... largest shopping centre in the UK', so will (or should) mention this topic. Many of the articles do refer to other centres in the template in their article text. Of course they wont all refer to every other one in their text, but virtually no WP templates which I know of meet this criteria - which is of course why templates are needed and useful.Rangoon11 (talk) 13:24, 25 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'm afraid you have it backwards. The fact that the articles largely don't refer to each other (and they don't; go ahead and sample a few) is an indication that the topics are not strongly connected, and thus don't need a navbox. People interested in "other large malls in the UK" can easily go to that article to view related articles. And please don't try to bring WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS into the conversation; this discussion is about this navbox. Powers T 13:34, 25 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
We actually have an article on the topic (List of the largest shopping centres in the United Kingdom by size) which very much suggests that it is a related series of articles and a notable 'topic' for a navbox, but I fear we are going round in circles here so I will drop out of the debate.Rangoon11 (talk) 15:30, 25 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Er, yes, but we don't create navboxes for every topic for which we maintain a list. I shudder to think of the number of navboxes that would be on the London article if we did. Powers T 17:04, 25 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]