Template talk:Georgia counties

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This is the discussion/talk page for: Template:Georgia_counties.

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[edit] Created

The Template:Georgia_counties was created on December 17, 2007 from Template:Georgia to reduce the number of wikilinks on bottom navboxes of Georgia articles. The larger Template:Georgia had become used in more than 306 articles, with many not needing direct links to all counties of Georgia. -Wikid77 (talk) 09:14, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Navbox index crisis

15-Feb-2008: As the navbox Template:Georgia continues to be expanded with more cities or topics, and transcluded into more articles, the Wikipedia indexing is becoming a so-called "N-squared problem" or more accurately an "NxM (N-by-M) problem": when 2,500 articles use a navbox having 200 wikilinks, the overall effect generates 500,000 entries into the Wikipedia index-file database: the seemingly small navbox (with just 200 city/region names and topics) snowballs into a massive half-million entries in the Wikipedia link-files database. Currently (15Feb08), Template:Georgia has 210 wikilinks and is used in over 305 pages, generating over 64,470 total wikilinks.

The problem is encouraged because some people treat navbox templates as being shared subroutines or common menus, but they are not: in MediaWiki language 1.11, navbox templates are actually copied as multiple instances for each page when used, rather than implemented as a shared common routine. If just 10 pages use a navbox linking 150 cities/regions, that's 1,500 index entries, and the current result has become the thousands of index entries already created by Template:Georgia. Solutions are being implemented to avoid the growing navbox index crisis, as discussed below. -Wikid77 (talk) 09:14, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Template:Texas reduces navbox crisis

15-Feb-2008: As a very simple solution to navbox overlinking, the Template:Texas does not contain box links to the 254 counties in Texas (most of any state); instead, Template:Texas merely links the full-length counties article by "See: List of Texas counties". Although Template:Texas gives a simple solution reducing the navbox crisis, it had the drawback of linking a very long article to provide county-name links, rather than a short navbox template of county-names. Instead, I created a condensed state-counties template for only counties of a state, similar to Template:Texas, but with only box links to county-names, avoiding a full-length article listing descriptions of all counties. Then, that kind of state-counties template ("Template:Texas_counties") would only be transcluded into a few hundred articles about counties, rather than into 1,001. Meanwhile, each state-template could be substantially shortened (by using "See: Table of Georgia counties" to also reduce overall wikilinks by 64,000 or so), after a condensed state-counties template has been developed and verified, for each state. Long term, the general solution would be multiple smaller templates:

  • Template:Georgia - simplified as links to other templates;
  • Template:Georgia_counties - condensed box of county names;
  • Template:Georgia_cities - condensed box of major cities;
  • Template:Georgia_regions - condensed box of major regions;
  • Template:Georgia_topics - condensed box of topic articles;
  • Template:Georgia_roads - condensed box of roadways;
  • Template:Georgia_railways - condensed box of railways.

Other small templates can be added on future subjects.

Once the major cities have been moved to a separate template, separated from the numerous counties, there is then ample space to list, perhaps, the top 30 or 45 cities in the state, alleviating the "Top-25" restrictions debated in February 2007. Similar navbox size problems have been debated for other states, during the past 3 years. For Georgia articles, using smaller templates could easily reduce the Wikipedia index-files database by over 40,000 wikilinks, while also reducing the daunting size of the bottom navboxes on smaller articles. -Wikid77 (talk) 09:14, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Stopped speedy delete

15-Feb-2008: Because Wikipedia trends currently propagate links 100x times more by using embedded navboxes, rather than efficient separate navpages, the stand-alone template was marked for speedy-deletion as an orphaned template: {{old template|1=February 15 2008}}. To avoid deletion, I untagged "Template:Georgia counties" and began the process of invoking it for counties in county-seat articles. -Wikid77 (talk) 09:14, 15 February 2008 (UTC)