Talk:What If? chapters

Note: I moved over the discussion page from my talk page, which is where the merger of the two what if? indexes was initially coordinated and organized. Most of the topics below were originally created on User talk:FaviFake. Thanks! --FaviFake (talk) 09:21, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

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Introduction to coordinate the merger

Hey! This is intended to be a space to coordinate the merging of the two tables. I see that User:1234231587678 and User:Apollo11 have been helping us create the two tables! I'm messaging you to coordinate a little bit. Since we're the 3 most active editors, let's coordinate!

My idea for the table was the following: there would be one single sortable table instead of two, and the information density would be very high. There were the columns I had in mind:

• N

• Date (the date YYYY-MM-DD, and then includes week after prev. article)

• Thumbnail

• Title (hyperlinked)

• Reader's question

• Randall's answer

• Book - in something like this format: WI?2, n. 40 (BOOK1,2,3, nr. ARTICLE NUMBER), which is easily sortable by book - for unnumbered, use the assumed number with an asterisk like this: 69* - this column would also be color coded, by book - this would also contain the title in the book if different - empty when not in any book

• YT (the date YYYY-MM-DD, and then a hyperlinked link with the YT title. if the title is the same, don't repeat it) empty when not on YT

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I realise my mistake was listing the things we had to do together with the huge task, merging the tables! So what happened is you both contributed, but each of you contribued to a different table. In an attempt to solve this, i have created my own table, which is ready to receive the two additional columns!

I believe this third table (available at User:FaviFake) is the best option for us to work on the index together, so that once it has the 2 additional columns and contains all the articles, we can put it on the blog page and delete the What If? chapters table. What do you think?

I have also made other adjustments:

• Made the Date column nowrap, so the date doesn't wrap around, and made the first column (N) centered and bold

• Turned each Reader's question cell italic, and added quotation marks to the start and end of each cell. Ex: HOW OLD? becomes "HOW OLD?"

• In the Randall's answer column, split the rows into one per question. For example, if there are 5 bullet points in 1 cell, split the "Reader's question" and the "Randall's answer" columns into 5 rows for that particular Article so that each question has its own mini-row.

• Added file link to all rows so you can just click to go straight to the upload file page.

• Downgrade: titles aren't hyperlinked -  ✓ Done  Update: I manually hyperlinked all of them!

• Downgrade: the last ~100 articles are missing. I'll try to add them the day after tomorrow! --FaviFake (talk) 17:06, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

Regarding the additional 2 columns: I've been thinking a lot about how we should do them. I see 4 options:

• Option 1: Separate Tables - separate tables for the YouTube video information and book information, and link articles across tables using the "N" column (or another unique identifier like the title). Advantages: Keeps sorting straightforward in each table. Maintains the integrity of your original table while allowing for sorting by videos and books in their respective tables. Flexible for adding future metadata. Disadvantages: Requires users to cross-reference between tables, which can be inconvenient.

• Option 2: Expand Rows with Sub-Rows - How it works: For each article, add one or two additional sub-rows (One for YouTube video information (e.g., YT video number, link, title, thumbnail), and one for book information (e.g., book number, article number, title, color-coded cell). Advantages: Keeps all information together, visually grouped by article. Makes it easy to see all data without leaving the main table. Disadvantages: Sub-rows might disrupt column sorting. Could make the table visually cluttered for articles with both video and book.

• Option 3: Additional Columns - new columns for: (FIRST COLUMN) YouTube video number, link, title, and thumbnail, and, (SECOND COLUMN) Book name, article number, title, and color-coding. Advantages: Sorting by videos or books is easy. Keeps all information in a single row. Disadvantages: The table becomes much wider, which can reduce readability on smaller screens. Many empty cells for articles without video or book.

I've also thought about using a template. What do you think of the idea of a creating a template like these:

 ✓ Done  UPDATE: i did create the templates! See the top of User:FaviFake!

{{yt|YTNUMBER (1, 2, 3, etc)|YTLINK|VIDEOTITLE (optional)}}

It would be used in the column that we still need to create. It would also colour the cell in red. I was also thinking of doing a similar thing for the What If? books:

{{bk|WHICH-BOOK|CHAPTER-NUMBER|CHAPTER-TITLE (if different)}}

For example, it would look like this (This one would also colour the cell based on the book, e.g., green for WI?1, yellow for WI?2, blue for WI10th ed.):

{{book|2|69|Jellyfish}}

What If? 2, chapter 69: Jellyfish

Would someone be able to create something like this? I know nothing about templates, and i doubt I'll be able to ask chatgpt to do everything for me correctly. --FaviFake (talk) 10:28, 18 January 2025 (UTC)<s>

1234231587678

I saw your message, and this would be a good idea to coordinate. Maybe also add the missing "Peptides" that was accidentally released on the blog, as index 153 (i think) or have two articles with the same index number, just putting "current" for the current article. --1234231587678 (talk) 20:47, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

Also I think the "0w later" or "1w later" on the comics looks a bit odd, maybe remove them entirely? The dates are already present. --1234231587678 (talk) 20:49, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for replying! I LOVE the idea of inserting the Peptides article directly in the index. It would technically make it a little less official, but I'm all for it. It looks and feels like a proper article.

I also fully agree with you regarding the 1w later line! I do like the idea of seeing the frequency right from the index, but it's too much right now. My idea is to remove the "1w later" part, but leave it in for the articles that aren't released a week after the previous one. For example, this would keep the 2w later and 0w later lines for the articles that have them, but declutter the date cells of the "normal" ones. What do you think?

I can't do it right now, but it should be easy. We can also delay it until all articles are on the table, so we only have to do it once. Btw, I hope to get all the articles on the table by the day after tomorrow or the day after that. Meanwhile, you or other editors can add the 2 columns (Book and YT)! --FaviFake (talk) 22:14, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

I currently don't have the books, so can't help with that, but I've added a few YT videos. Also the book template seems to be buggy (and/or a WIP), so I removed it from the 1st article. ALSO, the YT template display {5}^th instead of 5th; weird. --1234231587678 (talk) 15:13, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Thank you so much! I fixed the YT template, let me know if there are any other issues. Also, you can help with books, even if you don't have them! All you need to do is look at the page What If? chapters, which catalogues every chapter of every book. The Template:book i was trying to create is broken because I gave up trying to make it work (1h and 20min of my life wasted). Anyways, we now have 4 different templates, one for each book (the fourth is a placeholder!): Template:book1, Template:book2, Template:book3, Template:book4. There are instructions on hot to use them on their page. Please continue adding the videos and the books if you can! This is exactly what we need! --FaviFake (talk) 15:18, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Apollo11

This a big page so I’m not sure I’m in the right spot (also typing one handed so sorry for mistakes). I like the table on you page, however I did notice it’s missing which book it’s in and the YouTube channel. I love how the one I edited was formatted, I think if you added that table to your existing table it’d be perfect. I would also add a page number for the books. Apollo11 (talk) 16:34, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

Ok just saw the three options. I’d go with either 1 or 3. 1 would look the best and probably be easiest to find what you’re looking for as long as your have links to the other tables very clear. What I would do is have a table with title, and where to find the article (blog, book 1, book 2, YouTube). Then have a 4 tables, one for each, where you can go more in depth about each article, date, explanation, jokes, things like that. Option 3 would be the simplest, and if that’s what you wanna do, I’d have the simplest things on the left and the more complicated things on the right. So the date and title would be in the left and the e explanation would be far to the right. You’ve probably been thinking about this a lot longer than me so I’m probably missing something, so please tell me if I’m wrong abo it anything. Also if my comment is in the wrong spot feel free to move me to the right conversation. I’d love to help in anyway!! Just give me directions and I’ll do by best!! Apollo11 (talk) 16:58, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

Thanks so much for your interest! I thought about it a lot today, and i landed on 1, huge, information-laden table. I think having 3 or 4 tables would be too confusing and too hard to navigate. Plus, i think i found a good way to avoid making the table too wide. I added a few articles to showcase it. I don't have a lot of time to do all of them. Regarding the page number, I used the chapter number since it's easier for people who don't own the books.

> I’d love to help in anyway!! Just give me directions and I’ll do by best!!

Love it! You can do everything that's listed at the top of User:FaviFake, but the first one might be more annoying to do on a phone (I'm not sure where you're editing from, actually). If you don't understand something on that page, please do let me know. I promise i'll answer quicker next time. ;) --FaviFake (talk) 20:03, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Looks great!! I’ll get on it sometime early next week!! (Ftr I’m usually on a phone but sometimes I’ll go over to a computer for bigger projects, like added links and full researched paragraphs) Apollo11 (talk) 20:56, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Amazing! I hope I'll have added all the missing articles by the day after tomorrow. --FaviFake (talk) 21:30, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Adding the book-exclusive articles

I noticed that there’s not a column for if the article is in the blog. I also don't think some of the ones in the book that aren’t on the blog are in there. Please correct me if I’m wrong. Apollo11 (talk) 18:17, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, I’ve noticed that some of the What If? Chapters aren’t in the table. I think that we should add them in too 42.book.addict^{Talk to me!} 18:42, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

Thank you all for pointing it out! And again sorry it took me so long, I'm not good at prioritising. (but at least today i did something! I fixed both the YouTube template, there are new instructions on User:FaviFake, and the book templates when used in merged cells. Anyways!)

I had forgotten the other table also contained the book-exclusive questions! Of course we should add them! We need to think about this before doing anything though. I have so many questions!

• In what order do we put them? Unfortunately, the chapter of the book are mixed between non-excusive and exclusive.
• Do we need all the columns?

N	Date	Thumbnail	Title	Reader's question	Randall's answer	Books	YouTube

• • What happens to the unnecessary columns? We could merge them, but I'm not sure whether the sorting will work if we merge them.
• Should we change the columns, so that the blog number column is more similar to the Book and YouTube columns? Or are blog articles more important because they fill all the cells, while book-exclusives don't have all the same info?
• Is there ANY way you can think of to make the insertion of these articles into the existing index seamless? I'm usually on the side of one big index instead of many little indexes, but I'm having a hard time figuring this out. One of the main reasons I wanted to do this project was so that people wouldn't need to move between 2 different tables to see all articles.

One way could be to just add all book-exclusive articles, each in their own row, in a big dump on the release date of the book. Even tho it would technically be in chronological order, i don't really like the idea. Please send all your thought! There must me something I'm not thinking of, or something I've been thinking wrong about! --FaviFake (talk) 18:10, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

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• What order do we put them in

I would do it in the same order as the other table, blog articles first in chronological, what if chapters in chapter order. I believe the YouTube channel is all old questions, but if he posts a new one, then put that below the books.

• change blog columns

I think you should move the blog date and number to after randalls answer, similar to the books, and for the date for book exclusives maybe jus the book release date? Or NA.

• unessery colums

Example?

• Seamless integration

Just stick them on the bottom, the exact same way you’d put another blog article on the bottom.

I think that covers it all? Apollo11 (talk) 19:15, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

Sticking the chapters at the end was the same idea I had, and I think that we can just put (What If? Exclusive) inside the date part of the table. 42.book.addict^{Talk to me!} 19:22, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for replying so quickly! I don't have time right now to read everything but I can already tell that this is much easier than I thought it would be. I'll answer tomorrow. Before i start overthinking everything: What would you put inside the columns thumbnail, Question, and Answer? Just empty? I'm trying to think of something useful.

Also, what do you think of merging the N (blog) column and the Date columns, just like we do with the YouTube column? Would there be any downsides?

I hope I'm not preventing it edits by not adding the articles quickly, in the meantime you can help by adding YT videos, now that the template works! --FaviFake (talk) 21:31, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

I think that the YT videos are all added? At least the blog ones and not the What If? exclusive ones. Or maybe Restricted Mode on my home wifi is blocking some. But I think that it’s all done? Tried my best anyways 42.book.addict^{Talk to me!} 03:52, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

This is great news, thanks! I didn't know there were YouTube videos on book-exclusive articles! I'll get started, this is my plan:

• The book articles are positioned like the old What If? chapters table.
• New column setup:

Thumbnail	Title	Reader's question	Randall's answer	Blog (this contains both N and Date)	Books	YouTube

• The sometimes-unnecessary columns are left empty.
• The Blog column is more similar to the Book and YouTube columns: it has a template and colors the cell light blue.

I feel great about this! We're getting near the finish line. --FaviFake (talk) 15:36, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

I think that I added all the What If? And What If? 2 chapters to the table for the ones that were copied from the blog 42.book.addict^{Talk to me!} 23:48, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Love it! I hope i'll be able to add some of the missing articles today, but i might not be able to do them all (or any at all). --FaviFake (talk) 18:01, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

 ✓ Done  I did it! You can now add the missing YT videos :) -- FaviFake (talk) 20:49, 24 January 2025 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Doing it now! 42.book.addict^{Talk to me!} 21:24, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

based on the 20 videos that I can see on the YT channel, ALL YT VIDEOS HAVE BEEN ADDED! 42.book.addict^{Talk to me!} 21:39, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

We actually did it! Now all that's left are the explanations, which i'm sure people will prefer doing over merging 2 wikipedia tables. There's just one small problem: I searched for "Featured in What If?," and instead of 69 results, i got 67. This means two of the articles that are both in the book and in the blog haven't been added. Do you think you could figure out which ones? I also checked the other book and the YouTube videos, and they're all there, it's just the first book. Again, thank you so much for all your work, it would've likely taken weeks to get to this point without your efforts! --FaviFake (talk) 11:21, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

ok, i’ll poke around and see if i can find them. also, I GOT WHAT IF? 10TH ANNIVERSARY! i can add the bonus chapter that is at the end-it’s basically “what if we tried more power” when blasting away at the moon with lasers. 42.book.addict^{Talk to me!} 21:22, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

Congrats on the book! I didn't buy it because i have the original, it's great that someone here owns it. Can you describe in a little more detail the last chapter? I don't understand a few things: does the second YouTube video say exactly the same thing as the blog article? Why are there two videos about 1 article? Or is the second YT video only about the Bonus Chapter in the book, which goes even further than the blog article? Is that bonus chapter not in any other book or blog? Thanks! --FaviFake (talk) 11:13, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

Also, is the chapter only called Bonus Chapter, or does it also have other names? --FaviFake (talk) 18:15, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

Sorting "Chapter xx.."

Hi... An alternative to the way you are lead-zeroing the text cell's numeric suffix, for sorting purposes, which is what I think this is all about, would be to do so something like:

... || data-sort-value={{{1}}} | Chapter {{{1}}} || ...

Should be able to deal with any numeric value, while still rendering it simply as "Chapelter 1"/"Chapter 10"/"Chapter 100"/ etc, but adding data-sort-type="number" to the header cell might even be able to sort not-quite-numbers, should a future book ever do chapters like "... 7, 7a, 9, 10, 11, 12, 12b, 14, ...".
Perhaps even data-sort-value=<booknumber>.<chapternumber> would be useful. Though you'd have to use the sufficient-leading-zeroes method, again, and could start at 1.0000001 just in case there's ever a million (but not more than 10mil-1) chapters in a future bookbut would probably be useful to sort all book-contained items, across all books but not interleaved.
I'll let you consider if/what you find it more useful. And perhaps check if I've given you the right table markup options by going and checking the Help:Sorting Tables/whatever pages. ;) 141.101.99.107 00:01, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

I agree that the current method isn't great, and I'm very glad to see there's another, better way. Unfortunately, I don't really understand most of what you said. BUT! You seem very experienced and I don't have a lot of time, so it would be perfect if you could edit directly the templates/table/cells/whatever needs to be changed. The best option is to remove the leading zeroes and still make the sorting work, for the blog, books, and YT templates. If you (or someone else) could do that, it'd be wonderful. Please feel free to try it yourself if you want! --FaviFake (talk) 11:13, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

weird table bugs

hey favifake, i found two bugs that i don’t really know how to fix in the table: one of them is in regard to the what if 2 template, whenever it has a “S2” or a “W1” “chapter” it gives an error. the second bug can be found on the laser pointer row-i added the what if? 10th anniversary template, but the yt template doesn’t “fit” (for lack of a better word) with the table. could you dig into these and try to figure out what has gone wrong? thanks! 42.book.addict^{Talk to me!} 00:55, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

Hey 42! I saw what you were trying to do, i think i fixed it now? I removed the book3 template from the original Laser Pointer row because all original articles are technically in the 10th Ann. book. (i added "exclusively on" to the book3 template to make it clearer). Regarding the other S1 bug, i don't know why but it seems fixed now?? I saw the error just a few hours ago and now it works. I have no idea what happened. Let me know if it reappears or something. --FaviFake (talk) 11:13, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

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Without going in and trying it myself, is this because of the "trying to zero-pad a number" thing (as given a possible alternative, above), because it can't test if <usually number, in this case text> is greater/less than <static number>?

Quick-fix (not doing anything else new) would need the test enclosed with an isthisanumber? test (if so, do zero-padding testing, etc; if not, maybe don't try).

Exactly how S2/W1 sorts (or doesn't) using the sorting data (bare number only!) and/or the forced data type as number (to do its best for what numeric data it is presented, despite occasional non-numeric interloping characters), would need testing.

Or I misunderstand. But, if I don't, maybe this is useful additional pointer to a solution/acceptance of the problem. 172.71.178.123 01:21, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

IP user, I answered above. :) --FaviFake (talk) 11:13, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

Interesting streamlined 'table furniture', but...

...I'm wondering about the current (slight) usage differences between:

style="text-align:center" | {{{1}}}

and:

style="white-space:nowrap" |

Do you need to add the Param1 to the nowrap/remove if from the text-alignment?

And what if someone wanted no-wrap+centre at the same time? There maybe are ways to combine {{ac|<foo>}} and {{nw}}, but it seems non-trivial to to do. (Unless you make a {{nwac}}, but then where do you end?) I'm wondering if you should try it without the |-character.

Let's see if that could work:

Test

Foo	Bar	Baz
Normal text of a normal style	This is as if using variations {{ac|<foo>}} and {{nw}} as rendered without the pipe-character or inconsistent parameter, which is tricky to demonstrate with the actual templates.	More normal text of a normal style
Normal text of a normal style	style="white-space:nowrap" | This is how {{ac|{{nw}} <foo>}} might look	More normal text of a normal style
Normal text of a normal style	style="white-space:nowrap" | This is how {{ac|{{nw}} <foo>}} does look, using the current state of the templates. NB. Why is it in bold? Is that a normal feature of a style of text-align:center?	More normal text of a normal style
Normal text of a normal style	style="text-align:center" | This is how {{nw}} {{ac|<foo>}} might look	More normal text of a normal style
Normal text of a normal style	style="text-align:center" | This is how {{nw}} {{ac|<foo>}} does look, using the current state of the templates. Also goes bold, I notice!	More normal text of a normal style

So, yes, it looks like it might be better to just remove the pipe (or pipe-and-param) and rely on the table-writer to just put in the relevent bare style-giving {{}} (or {{}}s) before the pipe. (I must look into why there's unexpected boldness. I don't know if that comes from the way you templated it or as an associated function of the aligh-center style. But it doesn't appear when I do it 'raw'.) Anyway, food for thought, over to you. It looks like I could edit your templates, but that might be rude, and would of course instantly break whatever it is you're currently using them (singly) for. That's the What If? table, I suppose? Anyway, you can both 'fix' how they work and adjust how they are invoked, rather than leaving me to guess about the latter. ;) 162.158.74.49 19:04, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

PS: Yes, I have just checked, and, yes you've added (apparently after I saw and copied the original {{ac}} for my own testing and emulating purposes!) the bolding to the aligh-centering template. That part of the mystery is solved! :P 162.158.74.49 19:10, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

PPS: I know what happened. I copied the (slightly formatted) 'plaintext' as it appeared in the template. If I'd have edited it and copied the wikisource then I'd have grabbed the '''formatted'' as you already had it by the time I passed by. Don't mind me, it was just something that made me wonder. Probably moreso than the thing that I was actually trying to prod and poke and solve! IOW: Ignore me. On this bit, at least! 172.68.205.151 19:32, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

I love how interested you are about this! Honestly i'm not really sure what exactly it is you're asking, but you seem very smart so do whatever you want! My only request is that the ac thing keeps working as expected, so i don't have to change the table again. I had forgotten about the nw thing, you can delete it or change it or do anything else, I don't use it anymore. Feel free to add to the documentation that these are just for 1 table and might break everything if used anywhere else. Or, if they already work everywhere, great! I remember I created them expecting the entire page to be destroyed when used, and being pleasantly surprised when they worked. So yeah go wild! --FaviFake (talk) 21:19, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

I'm not going to make any change without taking time to check your tables and making sure the appropriate change doesn't inflict damage on your attempts to curate the tables you're probably using it for.

But, in short, I understand that you're streamlining the (often longwinded) style="" statements, an admirble task. In the structure of "| cell || another cell || etc", you're doing something to save from having to do cumbersome "| cell || style="this-style: that; that-style: that; the-other-style: the.other" | another cell || etc", all of which makes editing 'difficult'. (I tend to do such things in Notepad, or whatever separate text editor I have, which lets me add temporary whitespace and use with no-wrap on the markup while I'm working on it, rather than in this textbox editor.)

But the single-pipe that formats the cell isn't a great difficulty to maintain (indeed, it is useful to line up). As such I'd suggest "| cell || {{??}} | another cell || etc" would be as good. i.e. leave the pipe (intended for the table-cell) out of the template. For the no-wrap version, that's easy enough. Though I do understand that you want to put bold-format about the cell contents, so that's why you give it as a param and explicitly bold the Param1 as you pass it back out.

Maybe the solution to that is to also add (to the style, along with the text-align:center) the "font-weight: bold" doublet. Then "... || <format(s), as templates and/or raw> | Cell Text || ..." doesn't need to 'enclose' the Cell Text in any way.

But making the change from something that expects to transclude the range of the template "... || format | Cell Text || ..." to "... || format | Cell Text || ..." obviously requires that each and every table-cell item that uses "... || {{template|Cell Text}} || ..." to be converted to "... || {{template}} | Cell Text || ...", or... it'll definitely not work as it was originally set.

Anyway, that's just my own vision of how you can do what you seem to have wanted to, without introducing more complications. As the cell-formatting gladly accepts multiple statements of the form style="..." (it adds style="..." style="..." style="..." together, much as style="...; ...; ..." does), an editor now has complete freedom to compound the two format-templates you created. And any additional ones that might be useful. Such ones to usefully colour cell backgrounds as red/yellow/green (for use on the various Confusion Tables), something that I sometimes take a couple of goes to do... not least because I habitually spell 'color' as 'colour'..! ;)

...but that's just to explain so that (should you/anybody else wish to follow my own instincts on the matter), you have some decent idea of what I'm getting at. There are probably other ways of doing it. Templates can be made to detect and extract pipes, so that "... || {{template1|{{templete2|Cell Text}}}} || ..." or "... || {{template2|{{templete1|Cell Text}}}} || ..." would equally produce "... || templateOneOrTwoFormat templateTwoOrOneFormat | Cell Text || ...", but that would take a degree of of unwieldy parameter-processing functions (that I'd have to work out, probably would involve some subst-function, but might depend upon what's available in the installed mediawiki version). I just think you could avoid all that trouble! 162.158.74.118 22:51, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

Forgot to say, that for what you want to use it for, there's another way:

Example 2

Number (Centered)	Foo	Bar (Centered)	Baz
1	Normal text of a normal style	Some text of whatever size (centered)	More normal text of a normal style
2	Normal text of a normal style	Some text of whatever size (also centered, though not so obviously so)	More normal text of a normal style

... This is only possible by newlining each new cell, in the example (you can't do "! cell || cell !! cell || cell", you have to line-break it as you change from "!"-/"|"-starting cell-groups), but it isn't really so great a loss to do so.

The "wikitable" class gives these 'header cells' a different background too, but (if you really don't like that) it that can be adjusted in various other ways (including with scope="col", I think), or you can leave the wikitable class off (it centres and bolds, but doesn't give cell-borders) and re-add the whole-table bordering style that this now leaves out. But you really don't want me listing every idea I had, just this one was the other (template-free) option to enforcing centre-aligning bold text on certain cells. 162.158.74.119 23:09, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

Huh, I was actually thinking of doing the opposite of what you're suggesting: include even more pipes inside the template so the editor is cleaner and easier to use. (UPDATE: this probably worse than the other option you gave at the end, see below). So instead of this:

|-
| {{ac|4}} || 

You would just use this:

|-
{{ac|4}}

And it would contain all the pipes needed. I guess then we would have to update the documentation to point out that this template's use case is extremely narrow. Also, if you want to see how it is currently used, the table is on my user page! That's the only place where it's used

Since you seem very interested in templates, What do you think of the idea of a creating a template like these:

{{yt|YTNUMBER (1, 2, 3, etc)|YTLINK|VIDEOTITLE (optional)}}

It would be used in the column that we still need to create. It would also colour the cell in red. I was also thinking of doing a similar thing for the What If? books:

{{bk|WHICH-BOOK|CHAPTER-NUMBER|CHAPTER-TITLE (if different)}}

For example, it would look like this: (This one would also colour the cell based on the book, e.g., green for WI?1, yellow for WI?2, blue for WI10th ed.)

{{book|2|69|Jellyfish}}

What If? 2, chapter 69: Jellyfish

Would you be able to create something like this? I know nothing about templates, and i doubt I'll be able to ask chatgpt to do everything for me correctly. --FaviFake (talk) 07:16, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

> Forgot to say, that for what you want to use it for, there's another way:

Oh, i think i had forgotten to read this part!! This seems very interesting! I should try that, since it seems much simpler. --FaviFake (talk) 10:10, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

Update:  ✓ Done  I applied your suggestion, now the numbers are in their own row:

|-
!1
| The rest of the table

--FaviFake (talk) 10:33, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

What If Chapters

Hey FaviFake, there are some What If? Chapters that aren’t included in the blog. Are we going to add them to the table? 42.book.addict^{Talk to me!} 17:41, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

Great timing! You sent me this message while i was in the process of replying to the question. I'm not good at prioritising, I should've definitely responded before doing other edits. Check out my list of questions for y'all reply above! --FaviFake (talk) 18:10, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

YouTube template

Hey FaviFake, on the {{yt}} template, you asked for help on fixing the code of the template. What help do you need to “improve” it? I’m willing to help now that I’m not sick, as I was last week. 42.book.addict^{Talk to me!} 18:35, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Thank you! Glad to hear you're healthy. That message was mostly a joke, but it is in fact barely held together. (Try modifying the hyperlink that's displayed when a title isn't provided, somehow what you add gets duplicated??) If you have the time and know how to make it more reliable and easily editable in the future, please do! I am honstly scared to touch it fearing it might explode.

Buuut, to be fair there is one template that i desperately needed help with, and that is Template:book. I wasted a ton of time to try to get it to change the cell background, and it never worked, so i decided to create Template:book1, Template:book2, Template:book3, Template:book4, and these do work beaytifully, but are harder to edit in bulk. (I still have profound hatred towards Template:book...). If you actually manage to do what i wanted (which i'm not sure is even clear after the all the mess i've made... ask me if you can't figure it out!), I would be very grateful. PS. I'm not sure if i should warn you, given my very low ability to create templates, but it's definitely not easy, imo.

I'm not sure how skilled you are at template editing, so if you want, you can absolutely continue uploading the What If? thumbnails like you did a few days ago! I just added a new batch of articles (about 60) thanks to some annoyingly complex jailbreaking of Google's NotebookLM. The new table of course includes the quick 100px link to upload a file. Again, thanks for reaching out! --FaviFake (talk) 19:04, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

The YT link appears to be going to [[whatever the name of the YouTube video is called]] and not acting as a [youtube.com filler thingy] linking to a YouTube video. I’m going to hit the books on template writing and try to see if I can do anything about it. Cheers! 42.book.addict^{Talk to me!} 03:11, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

Oh great, that's broken too. I didn't even realise it. Thanks!--FaviFake (talk) 04:57, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

Partly because you've removed the bit about how to better sort the book-column elements, but are using the same trick in the youtube-column, and partly because it's easier (more on that in a moment), I've just modified the {{yt}} to give it the sort value (of article number) directly. Have not removed the expression test to make "6th video ..." into "06th video ...", for sorting purposes, but I feel confident that you can do that (and remove the comment about making it give "006th video ...", in future, should that become necessary) if you now so wish.

For the books, I was thinking that if, instead of ="{{{1|0}}}", you could maybe use ="{{#expr:10000+{{{1|0}}}}}" for What If? (in {{book1}}) and ="{{#expr:20000+{{{1|0}}}}}" for What If? 2 (in {{book2}}), to let it sort by book and then chapter within book...

For What If? 10th Anniversary Edition ({{book3}}), I was thinking if you could make the added-to number 11000. Though anything from above 10000+<last chapter number> and below 20000-<last chapter number> would do (and 15000 would work), it leaves room to make any appearance of the 15th anniversary, 20th anniversary, 42nd anniversary, ..., 95th anniversary be able to use the mnemonic offsets of 11500+, 12000+, 14200+, ..., 19500+.. ;) Obviously, it would need revamping if there becomes a centenary edition of Book 1 (or any version of it ever gets so many "bonus chapters" that it breaks out of its own sequence into the next extant anniversary edition. But you'd need to start adding 100 newly-numbered chapters per year to do that, so probably not likely. But, right now, the sorting on the "Exclusive to What If? 10th Anniversary Edition" line sorts before the "NNth chapter of What If?" lines. The above should fix that...

And the format can be used for other (future?) books and their (possible) reissues: For What If? N, reissued YY years after the original, that's the number "NYY00", to which you add the chapter number. Fairly futureproofed, but if Randall ever publishes anything that makes you need to make the offset "NNYYY000" (e.g. for the quarter-of-a-millenium reissue of What If? 15, having a total of 512 chapters being 15250000+[1..512]) then I reckon the requisite changes will be easy enough to handle as and when, swapping in the expanded offset. And... hey... if they're still being written, and published, then I can only hope I'm still around to be able to add that edition to my bookshelf!

You could even redo the {{book}} idea (parameters of ...|book=#|chapter=#|optional:edition=#?|...) to only ever need to maintain the one source with all this flexibility. You've already got experience (by the 1st/2nd/3rd/Nth code) with what's needed to translate Book Number(+Edition Number, if applicable) into unique background colour codes.

The big problem, though, is still the non-numeric chapter 'numbers' in WI?2. I have two (or three) different thoughts about that.

• For only the numeric bits (currently, in the test for less-than-10, etc; in the above for within the data-sort-value="...") you might want to switch {{{1|0}}} with {{#if:{{#ifexpr:{{{1|0}}}}}|99|{{{1|0}}}}}{{{1|0}}}... This should test the param1 value for being a valid value (or missing, when you already make it zero... though not sure for what circumstance you should consider it validly missing) and using it if it is so, or else using the value "99" (or you could have "0", or "0.5", or whatever floats your boat). Then at least you'd get a value (that doesn't cause errors), though it probably wouldn't be sorted very precisely (though appear just after/before all other chapters of the book).

• The other idea is to use {{{effectiveChapter|{{{1|0}}}}}}, then you can append a parameter of ...|effectiveChapter=11.5}} to a non-numeric one sitting between actual chapters 11 and 12 (I haven't checked if that's an actual example, but imagine it is...). Also, for multiple items on page-chapter, you could even have =11.51, =11.52, =11.53, etc, to retain order within the book and upon the page... (You could also give effectiveChapter as "NYYCC(.optional)" format, direct, for all what if? Numbers, YYearly-editions and CChapters (with possibly sub-positions), come to that, but I don't see that as any simpler a solution as building it in.)

• The third option would be to use (for hidden sorting-only purpose, mostly) a value of P(.optionalDecimal) either as another numeric parameter or a named one, with P as page number, not chapter number. But, given how hardback vs. paperback (or just another imprint, not necessarily even a Anniversary redo, but I've got the UK edition with an additional UK foreword) might effect page numbers and/or where end-of-pages interupts any given chapter internals, it's possible that this is not consistent enough. But food for thought, maybe. Only needs to be definitively done once (or thoroughly checked and shuffled along as nevessary if redone to include other changes that require consistency).

Any of that make sense? Hopefully I've at least given you enough examples to ponder, where not immediately obvious. I'd really rather not change all your hard work just for the sake of a minor cosmetic change with a possibly major set of retouches, which is one of the reasons why I thought I'd do just the basic Youtube 'sort assisting' bit and let those of you who have already had so much 'fun' (tweaking the table formats) decide if and how you make full use of it. Assuming it isn't (differently) broken, for whatever reason may crop up, it shouldn't be a problem if you do nothing at all more with it (either in the {{yt}} or {{book#}}s). 172.71.241.26 14:38, 28 January 2025 (UTC)

• Thank you so much! Would you mind if I moved your message to Talk:What If? chapters, to group everything regarding the index in one place? Anyways:
• I did the thing on the yt and {{blog}} one and it works!

For the books, I was thinking that if, instead of ="{{{1|0}}}", you could maybe use ="{{#expr:10000+{{{1|0}}}}}" for What If? (in {{book1}}) and ="{{#expr:20000+{{{1|0}}}}}" for What If? 2 (in {{book2}}), to let it sort by book and then chapter within book...

• Done! Thanks! For ({{book3}}) i used 30000 to have the chapter in chronological order.

You could even redo the {{book}} idea

• Sorry but I'm not touching that... thing anymore. That template traumatized me (jk! if you want to try fixing it i'd be very happy)

For only the numeric bits (currently, in the test for less-than-10, etc; in the above for within the data-sort-value="...") you might want to switch {{{1|0}}} with {{#if:{{#ifexpr:{{{1|0}}}}}|99|{{{1|0}}}}}{{{1|0}}}... This should test the param1 value for being a valid value (or missing, when you already make it zero... though not sure for what circumstance you should consider it validly missing) 

• I'm not sure why that's needed (and also how to actually implement it). What happens if the value is invalid? it seems to work. Or is it required for the other improvements you suggested?

The other idea is...
The third option would be...

• Yeah this seems pretty hard to solve easily (which is why i'd love it if you did it!). I guess it'll stay slightly broken until it becomes a bigger issue. --FaviFake (talk) 16:54, 28 January 2025 (UTC)

It seems like you just forgot to escape pipe characters in the book template in the table within the switch statement, so it just interpreted the non-formatting statements to be a case grouped with the next 'actual' case guess who (if you desire conversing | what i have done) 07:23, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

BTW I fixed the book template. It should now appear the same as the other templates, and even work with the youtube template guess who (if you desire conversing | what i have done) 09:13, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

OMG THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! IT ACTUALLY WORKS! What! How! Why!

Thanks so much for fixing the template! I can't describe how glad I am to see it working as (and even better than) I wanted. My life is finally complete. I have switched to using your template in the index.

The reason there was a YT link in one of the {{book}} documentation examples is because I was going insane and likely pasted it there by accident. From what I can tell, you seem to have set up {{book}} so well that {{book}} accepts a YouTube link as input, while the {{yt}} template it's based on doesn't if used by itself (requires only the ID). I love this! Since we're gonna have many YT videos to add, it's great to have a much simpler option which doesn't require extracting the ID of the video. Is there a way you could maybe incorporate this improvement into {{yt}} itself? Or maybe you're 10 steps ahead of me and you've already done it (which wouldn't surprise me given the amount of wizardry you used on these bad boys!), and I just didn't notice. Please let me know! And again, thank you so much!!! --FaviFake (talk) 17:56, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

Also, since you've already rendered 4 templates useless thanks to your improvements, why not also add {{yt}} to the list of pages to delete, by incorporating it into {{book}}? This, unlike {{book}}, is absolutely not needed, and I also have no idea if it's as easy as a simple copy-and-paste, or if it requires more work. If it's the latter, please don't do it if you don't want to! I'm just throwing ideas around! --FaviFake (talk) 18:04, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

That IP, here. I (think) I fixed the sorting and error-fallback issues. I think (without trying to roll back to how you had it) you 'broke the sort' by putting in line-feeds (maybe double-ones), that messed up the table/cell handling. Then you broke the handling by commenting out too much (you needed to "< ! - -" and "- - >", without spaces, without crossing the quotes and |ing boundaries in data-sort-value="..." style="..." and the 'release', by pipe symbol, to cell-contents).
Recommented for it to work normally, first without the new 'sort assistance' and then with again. Had a look at the error-catcher (went down a blind alley, at first) and made it an explicit "catch all other inputs" for the errororing display, which I formatted in a more obvious manner and forced to sort to the start. (Well, almost the start. It puts empty cells with no sorting 'ahead' of even the -999 value I made it give any error-caught cells.)
If it were me, I'd be happy to have {{yt}} entirely separate from the {{book}} handling. It is mnemonically confusing and adds needless (and possibly error-prone) "if we have far too many params for Book template, feed it all into the Youtube template". Unless you're folding the whole Youtube template into the body of the Book one (even more work to maintain/debug), it's just adding complication for both server and editors who feel forced to use it. The beauty of the monolithic Book template is that (otherwise identical) "Book N, chapter C, optional new title T" information is trivially similar between different Ns. But it's not my project.
I'll have a dig about in maybe how to have a table sort "valueless" cells (in reality the empty value of cell absolutely without anything in it) beyond the sort-valued ones. The 'easiest' means I could imagine is to accept {{book|0}}, needing no further params, to create a data-sort-value="999999" |<blank> cell-definition, and have every book-column cell without a book-reference explicitly use that (ditto for {{yt|0}} to have the same pre-trap to it). But seems wasteful. A template {{empty}}, or even something like {{e}}, (without checking if either of those are free names) could also just give us this behaviour straight off, of course. It's potentially a lot of fuss to make consistent and flexible enough, either way.
But what I already did probably also needs to be checked for more edge-conditions... I may still have to tweak things when I have a better chance of catching errors (very difficult, on a tablet), and quicker. 172.70.162.196 21:32, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

I also think that the book template shouldn't be used for the videos, on the basis that youtube is not a book.

for the default cell, it would probably take no arguments (i.e. just {{yt}}), and it would also probably be it's own template rather than implemented on each template. However, I have done some digging, and empty cells (cells with no sort value) are given a value of "-infinity", so they sort as the absolute minimum no matter what sort method is used (which means always at the top when sorting ascending). I have been looking to find a way to make a row always sort to the bottom regardless of sort order if the column that is sorted has an empty/valueless cell at that row, but if it exists, it is not documented.

Interestingly, it is possible to sort by many columns at once by shift-clicking the second column after sorting the first column, and the rows will be sorted within the first sorting. it might be useful for sorting by chapter within each book guess who (if you desire conversing | what i have done) 06:51, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

Yes, a book (or youtube) template could default to whatever seems suitable as sort-value without params, but it might be more obvious if explicitly book(/video) zero. Or caught by {{book|nobook=yet}}, or whatever. I'm trying to think what looks least confusing to future editors (those expanding/editing the table, and/or template(s)), but conflicted about what to anticipate.

I had indeed been looking to see if the -infinity thing could be overriden by a column header defined blank-sort-value="999999" sort of thing. If nothing else, you'd expect there to be a perceived need to sort a range of cells so that explicit negative and explicit positive contents, either by actual cell value or data-sort-value, to sit either side of blank cells... Not all the time, as sorting to show blanks separate from filled rows with actual zeroes is also useful, but it seems to useful not to have been suggested as a configurable change.

The booknumber*A_LARGE_NUMBER offset to the chapter number is probably one of the most useful ways to sort by (primarily) book, then chapter, as it takes just one click. (I believe clicking the secondary and then clicking the primary does the same job as clicking the primary and shift-clicking the primary.) I see so little use to doing a primary sort by chapter (with or without secondary sorting by books, or any other column's detail), to interleave all chapter 1s and so on, that having a "book #" column and a "chapter(/page) #" column (two cells in sequence easily created by the book template, and could also handle the double-blank needed by book=none implementation, if we went that route) would be just complicating matters in an unnecessary manner. (As opposed to how we've complicated matters in a 'necessary' one!)

Good catch on bringing the BOOK+CHAPTER sort value out of the #switch, BTW, as I was debating how much of the switch-statement I could treat as generic and not need repeating. (My original idea for the 10th Anniversary version of Book 1 to be effectively "Book1.1" made me still want to option of overriding the N*10000 as being 3=>11000 instead of =>30000, but that could still be implemented by a bit of "(if N=3, 1.1, else N) times 10000" pre-logic, or by handling {{book|1.10|...}} instead of {{book|3|...}}. Anyway, not important, either way.)

...all this is why I left Favi (and you/others) get on with the original restructuring effort without jumping in (despite having two of the three books, and having seen all the youtubes). I had plenty of ideas of what to do, but did not want to restructure anything from what seemed to be a happy little project with its own momentum and targets. I finally gave in when I noticed an impasse being hit, with errors and confusion, to which I since hope I have provided a net reduction in both. Though it's only the first of these about which I'm fairly confident. ;) Anyway, perhaps I'm sliding back to my position on the sidelines, now... 172.70.91.245 11:20, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

These comments are great and extremely detailed, thank you! Thanks to your efforts I was able to retire these templates: book1, book2, book3, book4, and yt, so now we only have the huge {{book}} template and {{blog}}. I kinda agree with IP that it might not be future-proof, but I don't really see a reason to believe we'll add 2 more parameters to the book-specific columns. And even then, it's not that hard to update the template. But please do let me know if you can think of other issues with the current implementation! --FaviFake (talk) 19:50, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

tldr

hey favifake! i just came back from a 5 day yosemite trip, that’s why i have been awol for that time. could you please really quick give me a tldr of what has been going on in the past couple days? i see that we finished the index, but i’m just wondering if there’s anything else. thanks! 42.book.addict^{Talk to me!} 02:52, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

Welcome back! We now only use the {{book}} and {{blog}} templates, all the others have been merged into {{book}} by the incredible User:Firestar233, the templates are much more solid, they also added all the questions and almost all the what if? 2-exclusive chapters. So now we're only missing the questions from the first book and an explanation for the third's bonus chapter (which you own!). I don't have much time, but you can look at the history of the templates and the main what if chapters page, and also this talk section. There's also a to-do list above the index! --FaviFake (talk) 18:32, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

ok, great! i'll try to work on the chapter explainations once i find the time 42.book.addict^{Talk to me!} 21:04, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

Amazing! Thanks for your help. If you're interested, I've just added a simple (yet boring) task:

• "Need to add the name(s) of the readers who asked each questions. It's easy! The instructions are in the Editors section!"

If you have time, the names are missing for some book-exclusive articles and the blog articles. --FaviFake (talk) 10:59, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

Table for smaller screens

Do we think we should list out who asked each question in the table? guess who (if you desire conversing | what i have done) 03:09, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

If so (and I'm not sure it's necessary), please not as an extra column. Already it's squeezing what's there down, something chronic. At least on my current screen, right now.

• The thumbnail column can't get smaller (unless we use smaller/downscaled thukbnails, of course, but there's a limit to that)
• The title column (of the first non-hdader is "Relatacistic(Newline)Baseball".
• The "Reader's(Newline)question" column goes "(quote)What would(Newline)happen if you(Newline)(...etc)".
• The "Randall's answer" column is positively spacious (no doubt forced to be so by the "Too short!" infoboxes), letting it read "The ball would create plasma and(Newline)reach home plate by about 70(Newline)(...etc)".
• The three columns for Blog/Book/Vid couldn't be narrower and make sense.

If the questioner is to be asked, set it after the question (same cell, maybe horizontal rule).

In fact, what do you think of the following layout modification?

Title	Question / Answer	Blog	Books	YouTube
Relativistic Baseball	"What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?" Ellen McManis The ball would create plasma and reach home plate by about 70 nanoseconds. The result would be some kind of nuclear explosion, destroying everything about a mile from the field. A ruling of "hit by pitch" could be interpreted in this situation.	1st blog article, on 2012‑07‑10	What If?, Chapter 2	5th video, on 2024‑02‑06: What if you threw a baseball at nearly light speed?
SAT Guessing	"What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on every multiple-choice question? How many perfect scores would there be?" Rob Balder No one would get a perfect score. The odds of guessing correctly on every question would be less than the odds of every ex-living president at that time and the main cast of Firefly getting struck by lightning on the same day.	2nd blog article, on 2012‑07‑10 (7d early)	What If?, Chapter 66

Saves trouble of having emphatically unsortable columns, this way, being mere continuations of the cell contents we do want to sort. Assuming we don't decide we want to sort by "Firstname(s) Lastname" (or "Lastname, Firstname(s)"), as well as by sorting by "What would..." / "What if..." / "How much..." / "Is there..."ness, etc. But that's another step with another answer to it. (e.g. a "By" column with data-sort-value="Lastname, Firstname(s)" defined but no visible content... It'll be as minimally thin as "By" and the sort-glyph allows, only minimally squeezing the other columns. ...if that's more desirous than merely 'data-sort-value'ing the Question(/Name)/Answer field by name (whatever format), and finding little real reason to sort the "How"s from the "What"s from the "Is"s. But that's something that deserves more thought!)

But what I do highly suggest (at least add the "Who" after the "Question", same cell, and looks nice with right-align; on top of that, cell-mergering like this, probably with the horizontal rule markup in the Q&A divide) looks good to me.

"Relativistic Baseball"(noNewline!) and "(quote)What would happen if you tried to hit a   (Newline, etc...)" is how the example table pans out in Preview, which is an improvement for readability.

I won't pre-emptimptively assume you're ok with this plan, but (if it seems the idea is liked/not disliked), when I have the time to do it I could blitz this (or any other consensus change of similar radicality, that gets proposed instead) later on (at least 12 hours from now, maybe a full day...). I'll do what I can to fill (or visibly format, if already there) such authors as I'm not left totally stumped about for whatever nazcent reason. Sound good to y'all? ;) 141.101.98.190 05:00, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for your suggestions! These are my thoughts:

Do we think we should list out who asked each question in the table?

Yes! I thought about doing this after you commented each reader after the question, but didn't have the time. The ay you went about adding them makes it very easy to create a "find-and-replace" to do it for all cells at once.This is how I'd do it:

''"Question?"''

<div align="right">—Rob Balder</div>

In fact, what do you think of the following layout modification?
[...] cell-mergering like this, probably with the horizontal rule markup in the Q&A divide) looks good to me.

I don't really like it and I don't think it's needed, mainly because it only looks good on a small screen. Meanwhile, on a normal-sized desk monitor, it makes the table almost twice as tall on my end. I don't think we should optimise for smaller screens and disregard other users with a larger screen real estate. If you find any other way to improve the table on both screen sizes, please do let us know!

(e.g. a "By" column with data-sort-value="Lastname, Firstname(s)" defined but no visible content... It'll be as minimally thin as "By" and the sort-glyph allows, only minimally squeezing the other columns.

I don't really like this idea, seems confusing for the end user (why is there an empty column?), doesn't add so much value, and needs to be maintained. If someone wants to sort by reader alphabetically, they'll likely find a way to isolate the <div align="right">—Rob Balder</div> part.

But what I do highly suggest (at least add the "Who" after the "Question", same cell, and looks nice with right-align [...]

Love that! See above.

--FaviFake (talk) 09:01, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

I formatted them! All the ones that were added as comments in the table are now visible. I also added this to-do, mainly for blog posts:

• Need to add the name(s) of the readers who asked each questions. It's easy! The instructions are in the Editors section!

--FaviFake (talk) 10:57, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

Regarding "...on a normal-sized desk monitor, it makes the table almost twice as tall on my end." my display (non-desktop) has ultra-wide aspect ratio (when landscape; I rarely use portrait for browsing because then web-pages are scaled to unreadable levels).

With side-by-side Q and A columns, the "Too small" warning box dictates the minimum width of the Answer column, making the Question column even more narrow (when you take the minimum width of the thumbnail out of the horizontal space, then the title and the three "occurance" columns fight for what remains) than it might otherwise need to be. (If/when we remove all these hints to edit longer answer-'summaries', the table will doubtless realign its contents to a more equitable share of width between columns.)

Most often, this still results in (non-short) "Answer" columns being longer than they need to be, and forcing the whole row to be vertically wasteful. An opposite case (such as replicated below) does it with the Question having to have excessive linefeeds, being less readable (needs scrolling to read it all) and leaving a vast desert of blankness in the cell to its immediate right.

Isolating just the Q and A columns (to remove other confounding factors, for most displays except maybe phones-in-portrait - which is already an abominable mode and I find most websites look far more unreadable in ultra-tall-portrait orientation, so I generally avoid doing that on my tablet) and manually adding the line-breaks I see, you get:

"When my wife and I started dating she invited me over for dinner at one time. Her kitchen had something called Bauhaus chairs, which are full of holes, approx 5-6 millimeters in diameter in both back and seat. During this lovely dinner I was forced to liberate a small portion of wind and was relieved that I managed to do so very discretely. Only to find that the chair I sat on converted the successful silence into a perfect, and loud, flute note. We were both (luckily) amazed and surprised and I have often wondered what the odds are for something like that happening. We kept the chairs for five years but despite laborious attempts it couldn't be reproduced."

This... isn’t actually a question, but thank you for sharing!

Integrating the row into the above-suggested format of table, we get (showing just that single combined Q+A cell, minus any "by"-line), the following:

"When my wife and I started dating she invited me over for dinner at one time. Her kitchen had something called Bauhaus chairs, which are full of holes, approx 5-6 millimeters in diameter in both back and seat. During this lovely dinner I was forced to liberate a small portion of wind and was relieved that I managed to do so very discretely. Only to find that the chair I sat on converted the successful silence into a perfect, and loud, flute note. We were both (luckily) amazed and surprised and I have often wondered what the odds are for something like that happening. We kept the chairs for five years but despite laborious attempts it couldn't be reproduced." This... isn’t actually a question, but thank you for sharing!

Yes, the non-Q&A cells (which I've left out, just there) are still comparatively empty (especially as "Relativistic Baseball" isn't forced into two lines, and even the final three columns don't need quite as many linefeeds between them ...you could probably narrow them further by forcing some linebreaks back into them, giving even more width to Q+A column), but they're actually often less empty because they aren't as artifically tall as a function of =max(height(question),height(answer)), instead being =height(wider(question+answer)). The conversion to not force a short question to inhabit a desolately empty cell as long as narrowly squashed answer, and a short answer to be as long as an even more narrowly squashed question, seems to be more wasteful of space than to give combined Q&A far more width and let it be exactly as long as it needs to be for both to fill it (being the crux of the row, the rest being 'annotations' to the paragraphed question/answer interplay).

Though I'm not next to my own desktop display, right now, I can tell you that the space-wasting I'm showing is notable (though not quite so egregious) there, too, and I had already thought to try out (at least for a Preview) a Q+A column.

I wasn't, at that time, even thinking of thumbnail+title columns merging (which would help even more), but I'm sorely tempted now. Whether or not Q+A merging is accepted by the wider set of editors. Merging title+thumbnail could trivially let the Q-column expand maybe to double its current width, depending upon the other dynamics involved in apportioning rendered width and height. 172.70.90.9 13:00, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

Ok, for reference: The desktop machine has the following line-feeds for the above example, as currently shown in the Thumbnail|Title|Question|Answer|... format:

"When my wife and I started dating she invited me over for dinner at one time. Her kitchen had something called Bauhaus chairs, which are full of holes, approx 5-6 millimeters in diameter in both back and seat. During this lovely dinner I was forced to liberate a small portion of wind and was relieved that I managed to do so very discretely. Only to find that the chair I sat on converted the successful silence into a perfect, and loud, flute note. We were both (luckily) amazed and surprised and I have often wondered what the odds are for something like that happening. We kept the chairs for five years but despite laborious attempts it couldn't be reproduced."

This... isn’t actually a question, but thank you for sharing!(Single line!)

Testing the above-suggested format of table, we get:

"When my wife and I started dating she invited me over for dinner at one time. Her kitchen had something called Bauhaus chairs, which are full of holes, approx 5-6 millimeters in diameter in both back and seat. During this lovely dinner I was forced to liberate a small portion of wind and was relieved that I managed to do so very discretely. Only to find that the chair I sat on converted the successful silence into a perfect, and loud, flute note. We were both (luckily) amazed and surprised and I have often wondered what the odds are for something like that happening. We kept the chairs for five years but despite laborious attempts it couldn't be reproduced." This... isn’t actually a question, but thank you for sharing!

Again, produces shorter (and more readable?) rows. In this particularly extreme example, at least. 162.158.74.49 14:25, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for your answer, these are my thoughts:

the "Too small" warning box dictates the minimum width of the Answer column, making the Question column even more narrow [...] than it might otherwise need to be

• I hadn't thought of that, but still: if the issue is mainly caused by these notices, it's very easy to replace them with something else that doesn't force the column to be too wide.

 I generally avoid doing that on my tablet

• Oh, you're still the same IP as before! Hey there! My point wasn't that your idea wouldn't benefit small-sized screens like tablets (because it does, as you proved!), but that we should mainly focus on desktop users, which is how most readers that aren't on their phones will use the index. I don't like the idea of making the experience worse for everyone except tablet users (and phone users, but i can't imagine someone browsing such a huge index on their phones, so i don't think we should consider them). I'd love it you could improve the experience for both types of devices!

"When my wife and I started dating she invited me over for dinner at one time. Her kitchen

• I think that's a bad example because the question is 4x the normal question length and there is no answer. I don't think we'd want to optimise the index so that that specific article looks better but most other articles don't.
• I think the perfect example of how it will one day look is article 2, with the question being slightly shorter than the answer, and that difference being balanced by the name of the reader who asked the question:

Thumbnail	Title	Reader's question	Randall's answer	Blog	Books	YouTube
	SAT Guessing	"What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on every multiple-choice question? How many perfect scores would there be?" —This is a name	No one would get a perfect score. The odds of guessing correctly on every question would be less than the odds of every ex-living president at that time and the main cast of Firefly getting struck by lightning on the same day.	2nd blog article, on 2012‑07‑10 (7d early)	What If?, Chapter 66	16th video, on 2024‑09‑24: What if example?

• This specific example, which is how most articles do/will look hopefully, is ~45% shorter than your example and thus wastes much less space on my screen size.

the final three columns don't need quite as many linefeeds between them ...you could probably narrow them further by forcing some linebreaks back into them [...]

• If they need linebreaks, doesn't that mean that their column would be the most narrow one? I thought mediawiki balanced the table pretty well.

thumbnail+title columns merging (which would help even more), but I'm sorely tempted now

• But I think this idea has the same problem, looking too tall on desktops and beautiful on a tablet. I wouldn't want to ruin the UX of desktop users to favour tablet users, but i'd love a way to improve both!
• Also, I'd like to one day make the thumbnail bigger, because currently it's too small in my opinion. But if i increased its size right now, it would force every row to be even taller, which would waste space on desktop (and, of course, save space on small screens, or at least not make that big of a difference). --FaviFake (talk) 17:04, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

Is there a "mobile" version/url for this site? because there might be a way to make the table try to display a different layout if it's on the mobile url/version or if the screen is too small, but that would require putting complicated expressions in every row and in the header columns. guess who (if you desire conversing | what i have done) 20:53, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

Yeah I had thought of doing a similar thing, maybe have two pages with different coding and use complex transclusions to keep the content the same? But I wouldn’t even know where to begin with that. But you're the wiki-editing wizard here. --FaviFake (talk) 17:50, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

adding what if? 10th ann

as most of you know, the what if? 10th anniversary edition is basically an updated version of what if?, compete with red annotations and a bonus chapter that i need to get around to explaining. since it has all the original what if? chapters, should we add a red 10th anniversary box under each green what if? box? 42.book.addict^{Talk to me!} 16:12, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

Yeah I realized it was just small annotations after i created the template and now I've changed the 10th ann. one to say Featured exclusively on the 3rd ed. etc. Not sure if that's enough, could also be much longer since it's only used on 1 row, but we definitely shouldn't add the template to every other article, (would break the style= html tag). Someone should still mention that articles on the first book are all available on the 3rd (and add more info) on both what if? (blog) and What If? 10th Anniversary Edition.

Don't worry too much about explaining it, it can just be a couple of sentences. People can watch the video if they want details. Thanks for your work! -- FaviFake (talk) 09:57, 3 February 2025 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

The fact that the 10th Anniversary ed ("book3", in original nomenclature) was basically a bonus-chapter version of the original ("book1"), was behind my suggestion that book|3 should sort-value itself as between book|1 articles and the completely new book|2, but there are severl ways of doing it (including maybe using something akin to Template:Diagonal split header for book|1 (assumed to also be book|3) rendering. 162.158.38.96 21:08, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

That's interesting, I didn't know that existed! I wonder if there's a less repetitive and/or space-efficient way of expressing the same message ("this is on both"), but idk. (look, I remembered to sign this time!) --FaviFake (talk) 17:43, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

another question: should i be updating the explanations to be accurate as of 2024? many of the red annotations contain corrections or updates. 42.book.addict^{Talk to me!} 16:08, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

That's interesting! I like the idea of adding them, but I can't seem to find a nice way to add them:

• We could add them to the existing explanation, but that would be weird because half of the blog articles, which are public on the site, don't have these additions.
• We could add them to the book column, but it'd likely get too big, and we would need to figure out a way to make the template do that.
• We could create a duplicate row of every red-annotated article, even if they're on the blog, but that would be confusing and might clutter the index.
• We could create a new column, but we already have too many.
• Also, we'd need to figure out how to add them. Do we want to make the text red like in the book? Should we use a new/old template for that?

--FaviFake (talk) 17:43, 4 February 2025 (UTC)