Template talk:NCES School ID

Any feedback would be appreciated. I don't like the fact that an editor has to supply school_name and access_date, but I can't see how to automate those. the name would require fetching the title of an external web page and storing that. The date I could not figure out how to persist other than the example code given.

Otherwise, I think I did OK for my First Template!--Arg342 (talk) 11:11, 16 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The rationale behind the need for this is that 1) The NCES CCD website contains a great deal of useful statistics on nearly every US school. IMHO, this information is perfect for a school article's {{infobox school}}. 2) In order to be useful, many reference citations are needed in an article that uses these statistics. See Hommocks Middle School for an example. 3) Since the citation is to a website where part of the URL is driven by the ID number, it is not unlikely that over time the form of the URL would change. Given this I feel it is best to put the URL in a single template, rather than have the URL in each individual article. If the form of the URL should change, only a single change to the template would be required to correct the links in hundreds or thousands of articles.--Arg342 (talk) 12:05, 16 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

So this would supplement the info box, which would now have less info it it? It wouldn't duplicate it, right?

You might list an example. Student7 (talk) 12:45, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This would be used mostly in an infobox. The infobox would not necessarily have less in it... I guess an editor could just give the ID number and a link and let the reader follow the link to see the data. But I had envisioned that the data would be copied into the infobox as {{infobox school}} currently invites. When data was copied in, the idea was that there would be an easy way to tag each piece of data with a named ref tag. See Template talk:Infobox school#Suggestion for new entry for USA schools: NCES School ID for a discussion what led up to this. For two different examples of usage, see Hommocks Middle School for typical infobox usage as I had originally thought of it, and Martin County Schools (North Carolina) for a different usage that occurred to me last evening. Thanks and feel free to ask more if this is unclear.--Arg342 (talk) 16:02, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]