User talk:Bramentent

Hello, Michael19937, and welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, please see our help pages, and if you can't find what you are looking for there, please feel free to ask me on my talk page or place {{Help me}} on this page and someone will drop by to help. Red Director (talk) 18:25, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The function of templates[edit]

Hi, I've reverted your deletions on Template:Middle-earth. I noticed your edit comment which made it clear that you thought the various tales and one particular chapter were insignificant and not worth linking, that tales not published separately should not be included in template navigation, and that you supposed that the parentheses used in the template denoted unimportance. None of those things are true.

Templates can be structured in various ways: one is to make a dot-separated list of items, some with sub-lists, which are marked off with parentheses. The structure does not denote relative importance, though it's implicit that the subject of the template as a whole is a major one.

The criterion for being included in a template is that the items have their own Wikipedia articles, meaning that the community has decided both to give each one the time and energy needed to create and cite that topic to multiple reliable sources, and has determined that the sources are sufficient to make that topic notable. How and whether they have been published, and indeed whether they are books, tales, chapters, characters, fictional kingdoms, fictional swords or rings, or anything else makes no difference to their inclusion in a navigation template.

The purpose of a template is to enable readers to navigate around the various articles on a topic, such as Middle-earth. For that purpose the articles are grouped by their type or relationship. It makes no sense to delete items that exist as articles from a template: that only makes navigation harder. Of course if there had been items that didn't exist as articles, or that were not related to the topic, that would have been another matter.

I hope these brief notes will be helpful to you in understanding the purpose and structure of Wikipedia's templates. Happy New Year. Chiswick Chap (talk) 10:52, 31 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]