Template talk:Kerbals

Criteria for inclusion

A list of known Kerbals is appealing, but many of them are not famous. Some of them aren't entirely official either, such as those in the Selection Process video which are probably nothing more than Squad shout-outs to KSP YouTubers. Even Bobak doesn't appear outside of promo videos and he's based on a NASA scientist who they likely worked with extensively for v0.23.5. This may require some more thought. --Brendan (talk) 00:31, 25 August 2014 (CDT)

There actually no YouTubers in the list so I think that's not a problem. And the first five are all in game to see and the only problematic Kerbal is Kirrim because he is entirely fan fiction. And Bobak is somewhat in between, because we don't know anything except that he appeared on official KSP videos but not his name or such.

I would also suggest to replace famous with named or listed because, especially the three in the part description, they are usually not that famous. — xZise [talk] 13:45, 25 August 2014 (CDT)

{{Navbox}} version

Having been doing a bunch of work to unify other bottom of page navigation box templates, I turned my eye to this one. I've got the Wikipedia {{Navbox}} suite of templates mostly working (some functionality works mostly fine within certain limits, other bits are not really cleanly/easily usable until the CSS is there, full functionality is awaiting CSS being added to the site-wide CSS file). I've already converted {{Celestial Bodies}}, {{Demo parts}}, {{Parts}}, {{Stock craft}}, and {{Versions}} to use them. The primary aims I have here are an equal mix of trying to unify primary navigation template style across the wiki, and trying to make the individual templates cleaner and easier to maintain, with less big blobs of semi-opaque markup creating the layout itself, and more focus on easy to read content in the source.

So, I hereby present a quick and rough {{Navbox}} version of this. I'm still working on it, it's not complete, and the broken image processing on the server is a major obstacle to adjusting the style. I think the current images are just too small at 25px, more or less impossible for those of us will older eyes to really see (probably not so good for younger eyes either), but the server problems stop me from properly experimenting to find a good balance between size and visibility. Anyway, here it is, broken images and all. It's specially styled green, since it's all about Kerbals themselves, unlike the default blue on the others. Feedback is welcome.

I'm quite convinced that the images need to be smaller (but also a lot bigger than 25px), which would automatically allow the box to shrink a bit, just can't really do much about it right now. You can play around with my sandbox version if you want, but I suggest others do not really do much work on it right now, as I might well want to re-factor it significantly. At my current level of active familiarity with {{Navbox}}, I can make pretty big changes fairly quickly.

N.B. The Navbox templates underneath this are highly complex and used across the wiki, so please don't edit them lightly. This {{Kerbals/sandbox}} template is only used here, so it's safe to play around with it, or you can copy it to your own user page to play with. Also note that the current method of styling is a bit of an ugly hack, and intended to be strictly temporary. The method of styling will be completely re-done when the CSS gets sorted, most of those "xxxstyle" lines will get ripped out or radically changed.

--Murph (talk) 17:17, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

It looks nice. A few things I'd suggest: Move Bobbak to the others as there is no official usage of him (apart from the videos) which is different from the others in that group. Also I don't think that the images need to be that much smaller. I don't know how it looks on not so wide screens (what is acceptable) but as there are only a few I think having such large images fills a bit the gaps. — xZise [talk] 21:14, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. I've moved Bobak down to "Others", which nicely balances the bottom 2 rows with 6 each. Image size is a really tricky thing to get "perfect" (and that's when you have a server that isn't broken…). The arbitrary criteria that I've picked is to aim for keeping the table down to around 750–760px wide, which means a browser window approx 950px wide, or half the width of a 1080p screeen. That way it should look reasonable for a good wide selection of people, such as me with 2 portrait windows side by side on a big widescreen, people on cheap or ultra portable laptops and tablets with maybe 1024px, 1280px, or 1440px screen width (which may include using a tablet in portrait mode). Yes, it's good not to have too much whitespace for people with wider windows as well. The other consideration is that the wider they go, the taller the fully expanded navbox gets. It's a navbox, not a content page, so it shouldn't really be allowed to grow too tall (something like {{Parts}} fully expanded is an exception to that).

Anyway, it's updated again now. 150px on the top row, 120px on the 2 lower rows. They do feel "big" to me at that, but I can still squeeze the window down to about 950px wide before the table starts to overflow the width of the page, and it does look quite nice. Hopefully a good, or at least reasonable, compromise/balance of all the different factors.

I've seen bigger navboxes and navbox collections on Wikipedia, so I don't feel too bad about the size. I can't say I've seen many (any?) cases of WP using them for names and portraits, but we can just call that "innovative". ;-)

--Murph (talk) 22:23, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Ok, so after some minor cleanup of the template code, adding some omitted translations in from the original, etc, I've switched over to the new version. The old version can be found at User:Mowaw/kerbal/all (also User:Mowaw/kerbal/kerbonaut and User:Mowaw/kerbal/ksc, but I don't think they were in current use anywhere; this template used to just be a switch which transcluded one of those 3, "all" by default).

I've gone through the English pages for the named kernels, making sure that it's at the bottom of each page (it looks best without any page content between the navbox and the MediaWiki skin's category box, in my opinion), and using either {{Kerbals|kerbonauts}} or {{Kerbals|ksc}} on the pages about the 4 famous kerbonauts and the KSC staff. Those options make the related group within the template expanded by default.

I'm not going through the many language translation pages right now, so others please feel free to step in and check they look ok, adjust the positioning, and add the "kerbonauts" or "ksc" parameter as appropriate, etc. I don't expect it to be horribly broken anywhere, so checking isn't about that, just to try to make all the pages look as good as they can look. So, no real urgency required, just normal housekeeping and ongoing tidying of stuff. For your convenience, here's the list of all pages using the template: Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Kerbals

As with all wiki stuff, it's all still ongoing evolution, so feedback is still welcome on this template, and I'm happy to make changes or help with changes. It's now just good enough to use, so I put it into production.

--Murph (talk) 11:25, 9 June 2015 (UTC)