Template talk:University of Pittsburgh

message: The Pitt Band isn't really Athletic.  Perhaps we should rename Athletics to Activities or just make a new Category called Activities.  —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 130.49.4.80 (talk) 16:48, August 22, 2007 (UTC) 
::Actually, the Pitt Band is part of the Athletic Department.cp101p 00:31, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Comment

message: Hi everyone, I added new categories, because as the number of Pitt pages has been exploding, its becoming more difficult to place them in the categories as neatly as before.  I also added an "Around Campus" category.  Since Pitt is unique in its urban setting sandwiched in Oakland among so many other important non-university resources and institutions, I thought it would be appropriate to add a category that represents things in and around campus that are heavily used by students.  I did not include neighboring universities (e.g. Carlow and CMU) as they are not really places used by Pitt students...and people can navigate to those educational institutions through the Oakland (Pittsburgh) page.  Rather I focused on institutions that are key parts of "Pitt Life" despite not being official or exclusively "Pitt".  I hope the definition makes sense. cp101p (talk) 04:34, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: New Categories

message: Hey, I just wanted to say to all of you who put this together, thanks.  I turned it into a decent template for University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.  Excellent work, thanks a ton for making it easy on me!  Pete4999 (talk) 22:43, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Used this as a basis...

message: Hope you like the new template design.  It's based on Georgetown's. I think it saves some space, but we can certainly revert to the old one if people don't like it.cp101p (talk) 17:22, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: new template

message: I am editing it some, and a new article needs to be added Superbowlbound (talk) 05:40, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  buisness school≠ the graduate business school 

message: I must say I don't like this template for two reasons.  
# It's too branded -- it looks like an ad and not encyclopedic.  
# The colors make it difficult to read and break usability standards for no reason other than making it follow the school's colors (which is of no use to the end user).  
# The image instead of a traditional plain text headline is bad for search engines, screen readers, etc.
I'd propose that the colors be removed and the banner at the top is removed for a plain text headline.   Thoughts?  --Quasipalm (talk) 21:11, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not bothered by those issues.  There is no consensus guideline for infoboxes, unless there is something new that I am not aware of, and the photos in the title bar is simply an alternate location for images that quite often appear in the margins of the template nav boxes. In an uncollapsed box, it may actually save space by not forcing the text to take up more vertical width. In how I use the template, I like the photos there to be honest.  There is also no such thing as "traditional plain text headlines". Previously, many more infoboxes had photos in the header but were eliminated due to free/fair use issues with logos appearing on so many pages without a non-free media justification/rationale for each one. However, the images in this template header do not suffer from this issue. To be sure, this is a hold over from a early generation of templates, which would actually make it more traditional, but, more importantly, the header image makes it more immediately identifiable  (especially in a long stack of templates) and helps to visually unify the category, which is why I prefer it to tell you the truth. Looking at the articles that include this template, only 2 articles (re: shared athletic stadiums) out of approximately 130 are ones that are not wholly devoted to a particular aspect of the University (e.g. would not be considered the primary categorization of the article), with another 4 that are split athletic rivalry articles and 2 shared academic centers. Therefore, I don't think it is problematic from an advertising/POV as opposed to it simplifying identification and navigation in this particular category of articles. Further, I don't know of any Wikipedia policy against "branding" (or if Wikipedia needs to look like a traditional encylcopedia, as image rich content and multimedia is a strength), particularly since many templates/nav boxes contain images, even if not in their header, they are generally only set to collapse if in a stack. I disagree that an improved unifying visual identification for a particular article category article is a bad thing considering this template is almost entirely used in articles that would be considered to be the article's primary categorization. In fact, I think it is a strength and that more templates should employ this style. Search engines have no problem picking up these articles and the title bar of a navigation template does not impact search ranking for the affiliate pages at all. It is a complete non-factor, IMHO. Screen readers not reading the headline is also, IMO, pretty much a non-factor for navigation templates such as this, particularly with the remaining text located within the box.  It is not like the screen reader will say "Template for related University of Pittsburgh pages" and then proceed to list them in a logical order or cadence. The Exclude in print tool is used, as it should be for all navigation templates, and negates this issue for .pdf and text generation.  I myself am not bothered that much by the colors but I could see how that would be an issue for some and I understand how elimination of colors in the main body might improve readability. We'll see if there is a consensus on these issues.  I'll post a link to this discussion at the Pitt Wikiproject to see if we can get feedback. CrazyPaco (talk) 02:05, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

text: That is a great tool and a very good suggestion. I will work on getting the readability up. CrazyPaco (talk) 22:06, 14 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the changes have solved all of the readability issues. CrazyPaco (talk) 08:39, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

text: *Nicely done! Much better. --Hammersoft (talk) 12:43, 15 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. Nicely done! JohnnyPolo24 (talk) 16:41, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Too Branded / Hard to Read 

message: While this navbox is impressive and must have taken quite a bit of effort, I do have one complaint. It is so large that it really should be an already-collapsed navbox. For pages that contain this template that contain no other templates, this really lengthens the page and seems like overkill. When I was on the Alumni Hall page, this template seemed unnecessary to be automatically expanded. Jrcla2 talk 06:53, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: That seems reasonable. I set it to collapse by default.  Opinions on this? CrazyPaco (talk) 07:42, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Ah, much better! The header on this template is classy looking, so even when it's collapsed it still looks really good. If someone wants to navigate to a different Pitt page all they have to do is click [Show], so it's really not a burden on their part. Again, probably the most impressive university/college navbox I've seen to date. Jrcla2 talk 15:48, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Collapsed state