Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-15636815-20140122132804/@comment-15636815-20140128012319

Your interpretation of  and   is essentially equivalent to my interpretation. So, not much help. LOL

Date - How about this? We ask people to input the date into three parameters, using numbers only, then we display the date in "2014 Jan 27" format. Entering numbers for the month makes it easier for non-native speakers, and it reduces errors for all. As you stated, the version with three letters for month eliminates ambiguity, and it's still in the ISO8601 order. We could (eventually) convert all dates on the site to the our preferred format.

As we've all discussed before, many dates on the site are year and month only. I'm definitely okay with pages showing "2014 Jan", for example. Templates that display dates, OfferLoco and OfferWagon, for example, could test for an empty "day" parameter and display the date correctly. We should be able to add that functionality with only minor modifications.

I agree with requiring the four parameters you listed. We definitely should not require "set" because not every loco is part of a set. However, this is an example of another place where we could get the TD to set the default instead of making the template test for it. It would make the template simpler because then it would need only to display the value of the "set" parameter, regardless of whether or not the user input anything for it.

We prefer images in all infoboxes. Requiring the "image" parameter though, excludes people from helping if they can't, or don't want to, create one. I think it's better to leave that as non-required.

If we did all of that, then "type", "power", "tax", and "dispatch" would be required, and "image" would be encouraged but not required. All other parameters in this template must be non-required, because the parameters used for a particular infobox depend on the relevant loco.