Template talk:Welcome-anon-npov: Difference between revisions

– Complete the process started at Template talk:Welcome-unregistered-constructive#Requested move 29 December 2023. At least I can’t understand why why that initiative selected only four out of the 20-ish “anon” templates for discussion. CapnZapp (talk) 12:05, 5 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Opposed to calling them -unregistered-, but support renaming them, and move to Welcome-temp–suffix instead. The reason is this: names like Welcome-anon-foo gave the impression of something that might be variable; we didn’t know whether two differently named anons were the same person, or different ones. This is exactly the situation now, with WP:Temp accounts. For me at least, Welcome-unregistered-foo sounds like it identifies a person, someone who hasn’t registered; they are always the same person, they just haven’t registered yet. Temp better conveys the uncertainty. Secondly, for better or worse, the group that developed the WP:Temporary accounts decided to call them that, rather than “unregistered accounts”. Whether one likes that terminology or not (I was a little grumpy about it at the beginning, have come to make my peace with it), I think it will save us a ton of questions down the road to have our welcome templates match that naming scheme, and not have to deal with explaining time and again what the difference is between unregistered and temp. We had IP, we had anon, now we have temp; let’s just stick with that. Mathglot (talk) 01:40, 7 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

comment: I really don’t have a strong opinion, as long as they all use the same naming convention. Should you gain consensus for this, Mathglot, don’t leave Template:Welcome-unregistered-constructive, Template:Welcome-unregistered, Template:Welcome-unregistered-unconstructive, Template:Welcome-unregistered-delete (and any others) as is. If not, they all being called “unregistered” is better than the current divide – after all the proper time to oppose the renaming to “unregistered” isn’t now, but back in December of ’23. Anyway, a final thought on your counter-proposal: since we call it “temporary accounts” and not “temp accounts”, should you gain consensus, I would personally prefer we spell out the word “temporary” (it’s still shorter than “unregistered” so word length cannot be an obstacle to acceptance) Cheers CapnZapp (talk) 00:15, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I am not sure that we should have any of the unregistered (or anon) templates at all. The welcome templates mostly come in pairs (although there are a lot of exceptions): a registered and unregistered variant. In theory, they should differ only by one paragraph about how to register and the benefits of registering, such as in the third paragraph of {{Welcome-unregistered-unsourced}}. What happens in practice, is that as soon as you have two different templates, they start to diverge (example: Welcome-[anon-]npov: diff). Not only that, but not all of the main set have an unregistered twin at all. Sometimes, it’s the reverse: we have {{Welcome-anon-summary}}, but no {{Welcome-summary}} (search). Or else the unregistered one simply redirects to the registered one (as in Template:Welcome-anon-belatedTemplate:Welcome-anon-belated, so the whole system is kind of chaotic and unpredictable, which leads to a lot of wasted editor time.

What should happen, is that each template in the “registered” set should conditionally emit an extra paragraph about account registration under control of new param |temp=yes (or, |registered=no), and all of the “unregistered” templates should become wrappers to their registered twin. That will cut down the number of templates significantly, as well as keep both variants identical, except for the extra paragraph, which should itself be a template instead of explaining registration differently in every anon template, as it is now. That said, this does not address the topic of this move directly, namely, what the names of the unregistered (wrapper) templates should be, but I think the move question should be considered in this light. Mathglot (talk) 06:22, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]