Thread:Merrygoroundoflife/@comment-5754239-20170624152122/@comment-5754239-20170625213004

Merrygoroundoflife wrote:

I'm wondering, is this really a problem if articles which have ref tags in author paremeter are not automatically categorized? It isn't really a problem, but I think that it only ignores another, more pressing issue: any parameter could have ref (or other) tags and possibly break the automatic categorization, not just.

I think that simply moving the ref to the intro-paragraph is style change that might seem redundant to some, and I think that it would be a very polarizing suggestion. Another solution would be to add another parameter that says "this author parameter contains a ref tag", I guess. From a future flexibility standpoint, it's a good option. We could use an override parameter to automatically disable linking / formatting for any parameter(s) that break it. Doing so would require a check:

The problem with that is that we have to make sure that every parameter which breaks Template:Rip has the override. However, it would safeguard against other problems with linking / categorization / formatting later on.

Another (and probably the easiest) solution is to make sure all parameters with ref tags have links in them (i.e., they must have "[" or "]") or any of the other characters in the current check. Since these characters can be checked, values containing them would not be linked or categorized.

It's basically the override idea, but it uses preexisting code, which follows the old adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".

To sum up: