Help:Water Cooler (technical)

Water Cooler

---

Water Cooler Technical   post
The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues about Centiare, including semantic tagging.
Please sign and date your post (by typing ~~~~ or clicking the signature icon in the edit toolbar). Please add new topics to the bottom of this page.

Year_started

Hi, the starting year of an activity is marked as required - but I don't have that information for many businesses where I have the basic data to be put online. Also many companies here in town would probably like to be in the directory, but for now don't have e-mail and website. How to deal with these? Thanks! --SabineCretella 03:54, 13 January 2007 (PST)

In cases where you have allowed for a semantic attribute for which you have no data, you have two simple choices:

1. You can leave the data field blank, and the attribute will not render in the page. (Probably your best choice, if you anticipate that one day you will have the data, and you'll come back and complete it.)
2. You can remove the attribute altogether. It won't hurt any infobox to remove an attribute element. (Probably a good choice, if you believe that the attribute is irrelevant and/or that you'll never obtain that data point.)

I hope that this helps answer your question! --MyWikiBiz 06:26, 13 January 2007 (PST)

Sabine is referring to the template itself where 'founded' is a required element. As you say, one can still choose whether or not to use a semantic attribute within any of the templates/infoboxes. In this case, founded is required because potential customers typically want to be able to determine the number of years an entity has been in business. I would suggest that Sabine use a general date if a specific date is not available at this time. Centiare 07:14, 13 January 2007 (PST)

Whoops, I forgot that in some Infoboxes, certain elements are required, or rather, even in their absence of data the field label will still show up. Yes, it seems that either "living with" the empty appearance of the label, or filling in an estimated date, are the only solutions (other than Centiare modifying the template to not require this field). --MyWikiBiz 07:44, 13 January 2007 (PST)

I reviewed the infobox trying to recall why founded was a required field. I initially considered changing it to variable, but then remembered that we definitely want a consistent record of the number of years in business for all listed entities. Centiare 08:07, 13 January 2007 (PST)