Template talk:Chess diagram

Fixing underway

@Auntof6: OK. I've started to work on these. The whole thing is acting a little funky, and I'm not sure why. But eventually I'm getting things to work. Today I fixed Alexei Shirov, Caro-Kann defense, Chess and Check and checkmate. I'll keep doing a few a day. StevenJ81 (talk) 17:14, 11 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@StevenJ81: I noticed that some pages had left the maintenance category -- thanks very much! So the problem was in the pages that use the template, not in the template itself? --Auntof6 (talk) 17:19, 11 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Auntof6: I'm not sure the templates couldn't be improved themselves, to be honest with you. But the immediate cause of the error is in the template calls in the pages using the templates.

In particular, the template calls frequently use the string |= ... |. Apparently, the people originally creating templates like this used that coding because from the standpoint of the internal workings of the template, any text between the initial |= and the final | is ignored for the purposes of output. So people could use them as a less cumbersome way of adding comment text to the coding than using .

Certainly in the current version of the Wiki markup language, what ends up happening is that the software treats |= as trying to call the parameter ""—that is, it's trying to call a parameter whose name is the nothing between the pipe and equals sign. And it assigns the parameter the value "whatever is between that and the next pipe." So if that happens more than once—see how it looks in a not-yet-corrected article like French defense—then you get the error message that something is using more than one value for the parameter "". I suspect this wasn't always an error, and was an unintended (?) consequence of some other change to the table syntax in Wiki markup language.

If we ever really want to overhaul these templates, we probably should bring in the whole suite of module-based templates from enwiki. But for right now we can probably just fix the template calls and be done. StevenJ81 (talk) 17:40, 11 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]