Template talk:Whenua, takiwā o te Ao-o-Kiwa

Hey Gadfium, when I tried to link this page to its counterparts in other languages I noticed that a version of this template already exists on this wiki as Template:Whenua o Te Ao-o-Kiwa. I think this page here is more comprehensive (Template:Whenua o Te Ao-o-Kiwa hasn't been edited since 2007, other than by bots), but I also think it makes more sense to use Māori names for all pages. Would you agree if we copied this page's contents to Template:Whenua o te Ao-o-Kiwa, and then edited that page's name to read Template:Whenua, takiwā o te Ao-o-Kiwa?

In principle, I entirely agree that we should have Māori names for all pages. We already enforce this for articles; redirects from English names are permitted, but the content pages must have Māori titles as well as content. There are some pages, such as less prominent city articles, where we have no available Māori translation, and perhaps we can address that issue at some later point.

Navigation templates such as this one should have Māori titles as well as content, but we should leave a redirect from the English name for ease of copying material across from the English Wikipedia. It then becomes a non-urgent job to change the call to the template in the articles to use the Māori name rather than the English one, with no visible change to the article output.

The bulk of templates are purely functional, they produce formatting or navbox headers or conversions of units and so on. See a list here. We could move these to Māori names, with a redirect, but I don't really see a benefit to doing so at this point. Translation of template names whenever we copy from the English Wikipedia would be a thankless chore.

I was aware of {{Whenua o Te Ao-o-Kiwa}}, which was a translation of the English counterpart as of 2007, and the English version has been modified almost out of recognition since. I have no problem with moving this new copy to that name, but it should be done as a move rather than a copy and paste. {{Whenua o Te Ao-o-Kiwa}} is not currently used by any page other than the links on this talk page. If you agree, I'll also move the other recently copied navigation templates, such as {{Regions of the world}} to the names given in their titles, eg {{Rohe o te Ao}}, leaving redirects.-gadfium (talk) 18:28, 30 Noema 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You can move these navigational templates yourself so long as the destination doesn't already exist. You could move this to {{Whenua, takiwā o te Ao-o-Kiwa}} right now. See en:Wikipedia:Moving_a_page#How_to_move_a_page if you haven't moved a page before. I'll redirect {{Whenua o Te Ao-o-Kiwa}} after you've made the move.-gadfium (talk) 18:34, 30 Noema 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for that explanation Gadfium. If I understand you correctly you're saying it makes sense to try and give all new templates Māori names as we create them, but it's not really worth going back and renaming all the already established templates because no one actually sees these. That seems sensible to me and I'm happy to proceed on that basis. Hāpara (talk) 17:20, 2 Tīhema 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Not quite. When I copy a navigation template from the English Wikipedia, I don't know what name to give it so I use the English name. You can move it to a Māori name. Either of us can then change the link in the article, but because there's a redirect from the English name to the Māori name it isn't urgent to do this last step. You are welcome to go back to navigation templates and infoboxes copied earlier and rename them. However when I copy a minor template which formats text, such as {{Noflag}}, there is little point in trying to find a Maori name for it, in my opinion.-gadfium (talk) 19:13, 2 Tīhema 2015 (UTC)[reply]