Category talk:Pages using deprecated templates

RFD discussion: March–May 2022

The following information passed a request for deletion (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

---

Category:Pages using deprecated templates

·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 11:00, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

Isn't this just a maintenance category that is periodically useful? Theknightwho (talk) 22:56, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

Keep per TKW. —Svārtava (t/u) • 05:57, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

Keep. This is where entries show up when they use a deprecated template. @Inqilābī Maintenance categories like this are designed to be empty most of the time, and should never be deleted unless the templates and/or module code that populates them are already deleted/removed. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:07, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

This category is not populated by any of the deprecated templates in Category:Deprecated templates that are still transcluded in principal namespace. DCDuring (talk) 16:43, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

@DCDuring Which other deprecated templates are transcluded outside of {{etyl}}? Would be useful to subcategorise wherever they're being listed. Theknightwho (talk) 09:17, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

• Speedily kept happily. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 14:11, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

  Prematurely stricken (1 day after RFDO). DCDuring (talk) 16:40, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

  Not prematurely: the nominator is always entitled to withdraw their nomination. Not that doing so is necessary the final word, anyone can always adopt a withdrawn nomination as their own, which you have done here.Chuck Entz (talk) 02:35, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Delete this useless maintenance category. It is really worse than useless, because it is misleading. The category is empty, but there could be hundreds of thousands of pages that use deprecated templates. The deprecated template {{etyl}} alone is transcluded on 38,806 pages, 38,645 in principal namespace.

How useful is this compared to Category:Deprecated templates? I note that evidently at least some of the numerous deprecated templates do not populate this category. Moreover, the idea of working through this category when it was populated by several deprecated templates seems vastly less efficient that working through Special:WhatLinksHere for the individual deprecated templates. DCDuring (talk) 15:58, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

On the contrary, it is potentially quite useful. We have other ways of tracking {{etyl}} usage, so we don't need to swamp this one. I added Category:etyl cleanup as a subcategory, which is probably what should have been done in the first place. The point of these categories is to let us know when someone has started using any of the deprecated templates that populate this category. For any one of the categories in isolation, WhatLinksHere works fine, but as a group, you would have to check WhatLinksHere separately for each deprecated template (there are 133 of them, not counting {{etyl}}, though I don't know if they all populate the category- that translates to 2 minutes for every second you spend on each one). Chuck Entz (talk) 02:35, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

@DCDuring Looking into it further, it's not 133, but (apparently) the 90 in Category:Successfully deprecated templates. That's still a lot. It may not do exactly what you think it should, but it still does something useful. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:24, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

My mistake. I assumed it should do what it says on the tin. Evidently the category name is not SoP: it means something like "Pages (in principal namespace?) using selected templates that have been deprecated". DCDuring (talk) 13:23, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

I certainly wouldn't want to swamp the page. I would want maintenance-minded contributors to go to Category:Deprecated templates, select a template that they cared about, and work on removing/replacing it. In my small sample, the majority of the templates in that category were still transcluded in principal namespace. Do the ones that are no longer so transcluded need to have their code altered to populate the category here under challenge or should they simply be deleted or rendered non-functional with some kind of message directing users to a replacement? DCDuring (talk) 13:37, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Keep them, so that old versions of pages work. Theknightwho (talk) 16:28, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Do you mean if they are still in use outside of principal namespace?

Do you mean by working that the template name appears as a blue link instead of a red one? DCDuring (talk) 17:01, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

I mean so that we can see (roughly) what a page actually looked like when it was using that template. It won't be perfect, for obvious reasons, but it's better than a completely mangled page. Theknightwho (talk) 17:07, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

I don't think that's how deprecation works. Do you mean that you would want to read the code for the template? DCDuring (talk) 17:38, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

If I want to look at an old version of a page, but the deprecated template that that version uses has been deleted, it will look completely mangled. I think we should avoid that. Theknightwho (talk) 17:46, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

That ship sailed long ago. Try looking at entries as the were five or ten years ago using 'History'. DCDuring (talk) 22:29, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

That's no reason to make it worse. Theknightwho (talk) 14:18, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

• Kept, seeing as it has become populated. As I’m writing this, the category contains the “etyl cleanup” cat as well as three entries. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 09:03, 9 April 2022 (UTC)