Wiktionary talk:Votes/2017-07/Templatizing topical categories in the mainspace 2

Rationale

An indirect rationale but anyway: some people started using {{topics}} and {{C}} to mark up categories; the two templates do not seem to find consensual support in Wiktionary:Votes/2017-05/Templatizing topical categories in the mainspace, but {{cat}} and {{c}} could, based on the vote, so let's have a look.

A more direct rationale: a template with a short template name enables shorter markup, especially for multiple categories at ones, e.g. {{c|nl|Mammals|Zoology}} or {{cat|nl|Mammals|Zoology}}. The number of template calls added to a page will be very low, esp. compared to e.g. {{t}} or {{l}}. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:23, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

My thoughts

I strongly support templatizing categories when the sortkey is different from the pagename, and it is conciser to do so when there are multiple language code–prefixed categories in the same language section.

But it is less clearly useful when the sortkey is identical to the page name, as is true for many English entries. So perhaps it would be best to use the template only when the sortkey is different from the page name (ignoring capitalization). I suppose that is undesirable for three reasons: because it leads to inconsistency between entries, because the sortkey-generating function sometimes changes, and because there is currently no way of determining whether the sortkey is different from the page name. It would be simpler to templatize in all cases. I would therefore support templatization for that reason. But it is unfortunate that HotCat can't currently handle categorization templates.

Then there is the question of the template name. Both {{c}} and {{cat}} are unclear. They are both abbreviations of "category", which could refer to simple categories with no prefixed language name or code, categories prefixed with language name, or categories prefixed with language code. {{topics}} is an inaccurate name according to some (like @Daniel Carrero) because not all of the categories relate to topics, I guess in the sense of subject areas (biology, linguistics, history, etc.); some are lists of individual things or types of things. To me, lists are suggested by the term "topics".

The name {{catlangcode}} is quite clear, but it suffers from being longer and from not being intuitive because it doesn't specify what types of categories are prefixed with a language code. The initialism {{clc}} would be shorter, but more cryptic.

At the moment, I am not sure which way to vote. I see the benefit of templatization, but neither template name is particularly great. — Eru·tuon 22:32, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

I think {{topics}} was the best, but it has almost no support. I don't think {{catlangcode}} is clearer than {{cat}}; it is perhaps less ambiguous, if anything. If will be easy for wikitext readers and editors to remember that cat stands for category; it will be easy to see from examples in wikitext that the first argument is a language code, like in {{l}} (not {{llangcode}}) and {{m}} (not {{mlangcode}}.) --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:39, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

And {{cat}} could be changed to support uses like {{cat|-|English adjectives}}, where the dash (minus) means that a lang code is not used. Then, the name would match the full scope of application. Alternatively, the template could see whether the first arg is a lang code, and make the inference without the dash, resulting in uses like {{cat|English adjectives}}. These uses do not really seem to be usually needed, but sometimes they might, and it would eliminate the malnaming objection. --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:58, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

Actually, there are two ways the language code is used: to place it before the category name, and to retrieve the sortkey-generating function. So {{cat|-|English adjectives}} won't work for languages whose sortkeys are ever distinct from page names.

I think I've changed my view about {{cat}} after reading @Daniel Carrero's comment saying that {{cat|en|Languages}} is similar to [[CAT:en:languages]]. That makes it more intuitive for {{cat}} to add a "language code" category than for it to add a "language name" category. So I think I will vote yes on that template name. — Eru·tuon 18:13, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

I see. So it could be used like {{cat|en|English adjectives|lc=0}} (or different syntax, as prefered), where lc is language code and 0 is false; and it would generate sort key using the lang code, but it would not place the lang code to category name. Or {{cat|en|adjectives|lc=0}}, where "English" would be rendered from the lang code. --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:18, 3 November 2017 (UTC)