Help talk:Transclusion

Please add clearer real example text

I was sent to this Transclusion article from a link on another Wikipedia page, that seemed to be referring to it as a general Wikipedia tool (inviting me to investigate sources "transcluded" into the page I was on).

Maybe the biggest problem is that the reference was to this page, and should have been to a training-wheels page for Wikipedia readers and text-wranglers on how transclusion is used in Wikipedia and how to use transclusion.

And maybe another Transclusion page for Wikimedia text wranglers.

This page may be fine for code-wranglers, and there should be link-trapping for references here that should be to an article for wikipedia text editors that introduces concepts from the ground up.

This comment requests clarification of the Transclusion article for which we are on the talk page.

Most of the discussion on this page is technical questions on the use and coding of transclusion, among people who well understand what transclusion is.

This article needs a rewrite. It needs more clarity to be useful and inviting enough to interest non-programmers new to the concept of transclusion in learning to use it as a tool and enabling us to do so as we edit Wikipedia. Helping us will help us make Wikipedia better.

For us, please add sample text that makes internal sense. It's hard enough to follow without adding multiple unrelated nonsense sample text like lorem ipsum foo 7 wives. The brain of a reader new to the concept will be better able to see if the examples are internally comprehensible and logically related; something like

Two times two equals four; 4 times two equals 8.

Change original (& show reflected), e.g.,

Two times two equals four; four times two equals eight.

Add to original (& show reflected), e.g.,

Two times two equals four; four times two equals eight; eight times two equals 16. Two, four, and eight are mathematically considered powers of two.

After some reflection, transclusion sounds like a great tool. The clearer we can make the explanation of the benefits, function, and use of the tool, the more it will be used. I was able to eek out some understanding of this article and the concepts, despite the "foo" examples rather than because of them. It was frustrating to be deprived of clear intuitive examples. I wanted and needed examples whose inner logic supported and illustrated the points being made.

The word "transclusion," the concepts of transclusion, and code to adeptly accomplish transclusion are not general knowledge. Transclusion is a computer science concept, so little known as to be marked as a spelling error by my dictionary as I work in Wikipedia, and having only 170,000 Google hits in total. There is a real challenge to making transclusion clear and salient enough to be enthusiastically adopted by the great majority of Wikipedia editors, who are non-programmers.

To meet this challenge of clear explanation from a standing start, we need to start with the fact that the brain necessarily moves from the concrete to the abstract in grasping new abstract concepts.

Introducing an abstract new word ("transclusion") and at the same time introducing the novel abstract concepts it reflects, which to many or most readers will be unfamiliar or non-intuitive, and then stacking on programming concepts and syntax that are similarly novel, is stacking novelty on novelty and complexity on complexity. The result is that the overall meaning, concept, and use of the tool is quite hard to grasp, but maybe necessarily hard. It can be made only as hard as necessarily and no harder by removing the nonsense examples, and adding examples that make intuitive sense. The benefits, meaning, and use will be clearer if simple clear intuitive examples are placed rather early in the article.

Using nonsense words as examples deprives the brain of a cognitive foundation for the abstraction being discussed, by removing the concrete example that could illustrate the principle and give a starting place for someone new to the concept to grasp it visually and intuitively.

Implicit in the article is the benefit of transclusion as a tool, namely that a lot of wiki text gets pasted several places throughout Wikipedia. It's the classic problem of multiple golden copies of the same text, with multiple simultaneous editors, multiplied by the power of our wonderful wiki. Explicitly including an explanation of the problem of non-identical updates, (with clear examples) would also help readers new to the concept understand the problem that transclusion can help them elegantly solve. Transclusion is actually pretty exciting as a wiki extender, a further powerful extension of the magic of group improvement of the overall text. I'm hoping for a clearer explanation here that empowers me to understand and use transclusion.

If an elegant clear explanation is developed here, starting from the fundamentals, perhaps it could be transcluded into a page for Wikipedia editors, and another for Wikimedia code wranglers? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ocdnctx (talk • contribs) 20:47, 5 July 2014

Articles now transclude themselves?

I happened to notice last night that if you check "What links here" on (all? many? most?) mainspace articles, they now report that they transclude themselves.

...but not all articles: disambiguation pages, for example, do not seem to exhibit this behavior.

Examples (below are links to "What links here" / "Hide links"):

• Dischord Records says it transcludes itself
• The Discord dab page does not
  • (...but it does note that Discord (song) transcludes itself)
• Nor does WP:Discord

This seems like a new(-ish) bug in the Mediawiki engine, or is there a logical reason for this behavior that I'm missing?--NapoliRoma (talk) 20:07, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

Some templates or modules use transclusion of the page they are on to look for information in the wikitext like how to format dates. Dischord Records does it via {{Cite book}}. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:56, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

This is Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 55#Self transclusion. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:01, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

OK, thanks! Good to know there's an explanation.--NapoliRoma (talk) 21:10, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

Selective transclusion using excerpts

The section on selective transclusion is quite complex. However, now there's the Template:Excerpt which wraps and "hides" most of this complexity to the user. Therefore, this section could be rewritten and simplified greatly by referring more to the template. I may try such a rewrite myself in a few days, but until then I leave this here in case someone wants to comment or take the lead. Sophivorus (talk) 14:47, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Hi again! I just requested a grant to improve and spread excerpts in the English Wikipedia and five other wikis. If anyone is interested and would like to leave a comment in the grant's page, it would be most welcome. Thanks! Sophivorus (talk) 21:58, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

Requested move 11 August 2020

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: moved with redirect left behind. —usernamekiran (talk) 19:26, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

---

Wikipedia:Transclusion → Help:Transclusion – Should this page be in the help namespace instead of the project namespace? It looks to me like the page provides mostly functional explanation. Bsherr (talk) 13:33, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

• Support, this is definitely a help page, rather than policy/guideline or essay. --Jules (Mrjulesd) 22:04, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
• Support. Yes, this makes sense. Though this should stay as a redirect, of course. Largoplazo (talk) 13:35, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
• Strong support. Should be moved without a redirect. --ThesenatorO5-2^{argue with me} 11:43, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
  • @ThesenatorO5-2: without a redirect What do you suggest the current name be then? Nardog (talk) 18:07, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
• Support move, leaving a redirect (many links would otherwise be broken). —‍Mdaniels5757 (talk • contribs) 17:57, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

{{subst:RM moved}}

Repeat references in transcluded sections

I just came across a situation with a footnote error in an article selectively transcludes a section from another article. The reason is that the transcluded section included a repeat citation, <ref name=vnat2011/>, where the full reference appeared elsewhere in the original article and wasn't available to the transcluding article. I fixed this by moving the full reference in the source article to the section being transcluded.

Should this page alert editors to check sections they intend to transclude for repeat citations? Largoplazo (talk) 11:51, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

YES! --Moxy 🍁 13:03, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, selective transclusion can be hinky in the best of circumstances. older ≠ wiser 13:29, 13 August 2020 (UTC)