I would like to propose a change to the inuse template
when it is used on talk pages.
My Proposal is to display the title of the article that is being notified about in the wording of the tag. To do this, I want to change the first sentence in the notification from:
“Hi {{BASEPAGENAME}},<br><br>I found [[{{{1}}}|this article]] with an {{temp|inuse}} tag on it, which does not appear to have been edited for a while.”
to:
“Hi {{BASEPAGENAME}},<br><br>I noticed that {{howto|{{{1}}}}} has an {{temp|inuse}} tag on it, and it does not appear to have been edited for a while.”
Here is an example of the old and newer version of the tag. For the examples, I will be using the Sandbox as the article that is being notified about. I have italicized the part of the template that this proposal would change.
Older version:
Hi User,
I found this article
with an {{ inuse
}} tag on it, which does not appear to have been edited for a while. As you are the last editor that made any significant changes to this article, I am wondering if you are still editing it.
I’ve left it alone for now, but please remove the template if you are done editing the article, or refresh the date by following the instructions on the tag itself if you plan to continue editing the article in the near future.
Thanks!
Newer Version:
Hi User,
I noticed that How to Sandbox
has an {{ inuse
}} tag on it, and it does not appear to have been edited for a while. As you are the last editor that made any significant changes to this article, I am wondering if you are still editing it.
I’ve left it alone for now, but please remove the template if you are done editing the article, or refresh the date by following the instructions on the tag itself if you plan to continue editing the article in the near future.
Thanks!
I want to emphasize that I am not proposing any change to how the inuse tag displays on an article.
I also want to say that my change would not affect the process of adding an inuse tag notification on a talk page. When notifying a user of an expired inuse tag, you already have to add the title of the article to the inuse tag after the pipe (|). My proposal would not change this in any way, I am just proposing a change to the wording of the template.
I think that the current template should be changed because when a user has multiple articles with inuse tags on them, it can be confusing to figure out which articles the user has already received notifications for, and which articles that the user has not received notifications for. This is because the message that is created by the {{ inuse
}} tags refer to the linked article as “this article”.
Because of this issue, I thought that it might be an idea to change the inuse notification to display the article title as the link instead. I think that this is a good idea because this would make it easier to find out which articles a user has been notified about. Currently, you have to hover over the link and look at the URL that comes up to see what article a user has been notified about. While this is not difficult, it does consume more time than just displaying the article title would.
Additionally, not displaying the article title in the tag can lead to errors. I have accidentally removed the inuse tag on the incorrect article before because I didn’t realize that the inuse notification that the user received was for a different article. I think that changing the wording on inuse notifications would reduce this problem.
I think that this change would make patrolling inuse tags, which can be a time consuming and repetitive task (especially when college students are working on their projects), a little bit easier and faster. I believe that this would also help reduce the chances of mistakes happening.
