Template talk:Illinois

message: Since the other two regions are named with colloquialisms, why isn't Champaign-Urbana? Thesquire 08:01, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Chicagoland is an official classification that appears on maps, as is Little Egypt.  Chambana isn't even ubiquitous in Champaign-Urbana.  I should know, I live there. Agriculture 08:04, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Notes

message: Hi,
I have heard many people complain about the size of this template. I thought that maybe it can be condensed into a much thinner form. I think it is unnecessary for us to include anything except for the subcategories. If we have a link to "Counties of Illinois", we dont have it list the countie, it just makes the template too big. This format will also allow us to include links to other general illinois-related topics (ie. Hiistory). We can play around with the design, but I think changing it is important. The reason I bring this up is because while conducting a peer review of Chicago, someone commented that the templates at the bottom (Illinois and Chicago) were much too big. This is true on the Chicago page, but even more true on smaller articles, I do not think the template should be twice the size of the text. I have already made a similar change to the Chicago template. As Agriculture kindly pointed out to me, other states use this format too, however I dont think the templates needs to be homogenous and this change woud very much behouve the entire set of Illinois articles.
Tell me what you think.
--Gpyoung talk 02:55, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I of course disagree with the above.  Every other state lists the counties and other areas and it is important that this remain the same.  The point of the Template is to make it easy to find information on other cities and counties in the state without having to rummage through page after page searching for what it is you are looking for.  Otherwise the template is not a decent index, but rather a table of contents of very limited value.  Furthermore many of the individual city, culture, region and other articles make heavy use of the template and refer to the template in the main body of the article.  It is a critical piece to the utility of other articles and the suggested reduction would be detrimental. Agriculture 02:59, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reformatting of this template 

message: I have tried my hand at reformatting the Illinois template so it wont look so big on smaller articles and can be paired with other templates (ie. Chicago, Chicagoland) without taking up so much space at the bottom of an article. I have not removed any content, I have only tried to reduce wasted space. I hope it works.
--Gpyoung talk 17:58, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I like it, but think it looks a bit messy, I've uploaded my attempt at the same, you can see a side by side comparison of the two here: User:Agriculture/Template:Illinois.  What do you think?  I find it less cluttered and easier to use, and it is only slightly larger than your version. Agriculture 21:30, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Template Reformatting 

message: Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. states/state templates lists and displays all 50 U.S. state (and additional other) templates. It potentially can be used for ideas and standardization. //MrD9 07:16, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  U.S. state templates 

message: There is currently an ongoing discussion regarding standardization of state templates (primarily regarding layout and styling) at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. states/state templates. An effort was made earlier this year to standardize Canadian province templates (which mostly succeeded). Lovelac7 and I have already begun standardizing all state templates. If you have any concerns, they should be directed toward the discussion page for state template standardization. Thanks! — Webdinger BLAH | SZ 22:43, 27 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Standardization of state templates 

message: Let's try to limit it to places over 20,000 population or so, or places expected to reach that level by 2010.  Thanks. :) 131.156.238.75 17:25, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: According to the suggested population limit, then what qualifies as a town, or even a village?  I don't know of too many villages over 20k people.  I understand the spirit of the limit is to moderate the size of the template, but something about this does not make sense. --Lmbstl 02:03, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for the explanation.  My conception was that town/village/city designations were corelated to size, not political structure.  I don't have any suggestions for the "best" way to organize the info in thee table.  Right now, it is based on the political structure of the city.  To base it on population would create a whole new set of diffficulties.  I am fine with the way it is, recognizing that all templates involve choices of exclusion.Lmbstl 06:41, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Cities/Towns & Villages

message: :According to the suggested population limit, then what qualifies as a town, or even a village?  I don't know of too many villages over 20k people.  I understand the spirit of the limit is to moderate the size of the template, but something about this does not make sense. --Lmbstl 02:03, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for the explanation.  My conception was that town/village/city designations were corelated to size, not political structure.  I don't have any suggestions for the "best" way to organize the info in thee table.  Right now, it is based on the political structure of the city.  To base it on population would create a whole new set of diffficulties.  I am fine with the way it is, recognizing that all templates involve choices of exclusion.Lmbstl 06:41, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: What qualifies as a "village?"

message: YES, for the purposes of navigational ease, standardization, elimination of subjectivity, and significance of the cities listed --Telos 00:04, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I vote NO-- because we haven't decided how the template should appear.  Everyone can say what they don't want-- fine.  Now we need an agreement on the purpose of the template and what should appear on it. Please see below.  --Lmbstl 13:10, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Should the cites list for the Illinois template be condensed to include only cities over 50,000 in population? 

message: To provide a visual "menu" in order to easily access information about Illinois regions, counties, and cities, assuming that  hte reader knows little about Illinois.  I welcome thoughts and debate on this statement of purpose. --Lmbstl 13:40, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: In line with the above template purpose, I clarified "Metro-East" to read as "St. Louis Metro-East."  It is referred to as such in official documentation, real estate , and it clarifies the region for those not familiar with the state. --Lmbstl 08:03, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Since you're from St. Louis, maybe you could help with the Metro-East article. None of those links explain what Metro-east actually consists of. See Talk:Metro-East, the initial stub said ten counties, then 11 counties, now 6 counties. St. Louis MSA only includes 5. I don't know which is correct, I thought I'd add an SVG map, but the last image I found on Commons was dumped because it had 11 counties. --Dual Freq 19:31, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Purpose of the template

message: :Can we disccuss the inclusion of Edwardsville?  Nearly 25K people, county seat of Madison County (the most populous Illinois county in the St. Louis Metro), and location of SIUE. . .  --Lmbstl 10:16, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: What I think needs to be done is to look at what sort of coverage we have with those other cities and why they are included. I could see the removal from the list of one city and then to add Edwardsville, Illinois. We could sit here and say this city is important because....all day. But if southern cities have no been fairly represented, we should include it. Maybe this is one that could be swapped out with Freeport or Galesburg.--Kranar drogin 11:51, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Edwardsville

message: 16-Dec-2007: As the nav-box Template:Illinois 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 nav-box having 200 wikilinks, the overall effect generates 500,000 entries into the Wikipedia index-file database: the seemingly small nav-box (with just 200 city/region names and topics) snowballs into a massive half-million entries in the Wikipedia link-files database.  Currently (16Dec07), Template:Illinois has 159 wikilinks and is used in over 1,865 pages, generating over 296,500 total wikilinks.
The problem is encouraged because some people treat nav-box templates as being shared subroutines or common menus, but they are not: in MediaWiki language 1.6, nav-box 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 nav-box linking 150 cities/regions, that's 1,500 index entries, and the current result has become the 296,500 index entries already created by Template:Illinois. Solutions are being implemented to avoid the growing nav-box index crisis, as discussed below. -Wikid77 (talk) 07:39, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Nav-box index crisis

message: 16-Dec-2007: As a quick solution to nav-box overlinking, the Template:Texas (since August 2007) no longer contains 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 nav-box crisis, it has the drawback of linking a very long article to provide county-name links, rather than a short nav-box template of county-names.  Instead, I suggest using 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:Illinois_counties") would only be transcluded into a few hundred articles about counties, rather than into 1,865. Meanwhile, each state-template could be substantially shortened (by using "See: Table of Illinois counties" to also reduce overall wikilinks by 173,000 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:Illinois - simplified as links to other templates;
::* Template:Illinois_counties - condensed box of county names;
::* Template:Illinois_cities - condensed box of major cities;
::* Template:Illinois_regions - condensed box of major regions;
::* Template:Illinois_topics - condensed box of topic articles;
::* Template:Illinois_roads - condensed box of roadways;
::* Template:Illinois_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 nav-box size problems have been debated for other states, during the past 3 years.  For Illinois articles, using smaller templates could easily reduce the Wikipedia index-files database by over 230,000 wikilinks, while also reducing the daunting size of the bottom nav-boxes on smaller articles. -Wikid77 (talk) 07:39, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Template:Texas reduces nav-box crisis

message: 15-Feb-2008: After Template:Illinois is modified, Wikipedia has the massive task of reformatting all "caller" articles (about 1,873 pages) which invoke that template, so the page-links for "What links here" can be quick and more accurate.  There is a delay of a few mintutes before the page-link database(s) begin being updated.
When a template is edited & saved, then Wikipedia must begin the (often massive) task of re-indexing every page which uses that template.  For just a few dozen articles, the Wikipedia servers might complete the reindexing of a template within 4 minutes; however, Template:Illinois is used in over 1,870 pages.  Therefore, 1,870 pages must be reindexed, and that effort is delayed and spread out as a long-term task for the Wikipedia servers.  The servers have a job queue of pending page updates, and sometimes that queue can have over a million jobs in the queue, such as indexing 1,870 pages for reformatting the modified template. With today's computers, there is a lot of processing power available to re-index 1,870 pages, over and over. However, if multiple changes could be carefully checked and combined as just 1 save operation, that would reduce the re-indexing to just 1,870 queued pages just once. If more changes are needed, that's okay, and Wikipedia servers will cope, but the effect of changing just one word should be considered. -Wikid77 (talk) 08:39, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: How Wikipedia copes with large navbox templates

message: put in St. Charles/Geneva and Crystal Lake/McHenry/Woodstock
98.228.248.239 (talk) 00:57, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: St. Charles is already listed; I added Geneva and Batavia. Crystal Lake is also already listed; I added McHenry and Woodstock. Maralia (talk) 03:41, 27 December 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm sorry, but I have reverted these additions. Unfortunately, Geneva, Batavia, McHenry, and Woodstock do not currently meet the population criteria to be included in the state template. To prevent the template from becoming too large, we have set parameters for including cities in the template. The state template includes the city of Chicago, all downstate micropolitan and metropolitan cities, downstate suburbs greater than 15,000 in population, Metro East (St. Louis) suburbs greater than 24,000 in population, and Chicago Metro suburbs greater than 30,000 in population. If we open it up to Geneva, Batavia, Woodstock, and McHenry, we would have to be fair and open it up to all Chicago Metro suburbs greater than 20,000, of which there are MANY more, which would make the template very large. This has been a concern of editors in the past, and we reached a compromise that included most of the principal cities of Illinois, without making the template incredibly large, filled with too many suburbs, and hard to navigate. I am open to discussing this more and building a new consensus though. The bottom line, though, is that we can't be willy-nilly in what is included and what is not. We have to have set objective criteria to be fair to all cities of a similar size and type. Abog (talk) 17:40, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semi-protected edit request on 23 December 2013 

message: put Geneva next to St. Charles
put McHenry and Woodstock next to Crystal Lake
move Elk Grove Village next to Arlington Heights
move Algonquin next to Elgin
104.1.25.40 (talk) 01:48, 30 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semi-protected edit request on 30 March 2014