Military history: Biography / North America / United States / American Civil War Template‑class

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This is not just my opinion. Originally this was a brief tool linking key figures, but now it's an order of battle and trivia list. The file size has tripled in the last 30 days. If this many figures are necessary, then the template needs serious categorization. A template so large as to be virtually useless risks deletion... BusterD ( talk) 01:22, 30 July 2008 (UTC) reply

Damn this thing is big! One quick fix might be to use only last names for the most notable of leaders, and lose the other two sections. All of this incidental info is amply covered on the various Gettysburg pages anyway. I made this template collapsible earlier this month when it began to annoy me as well (templates more than an inch and a half high I usually save my eyesight). I understand the use of link gatherers such as these, but then what are our categories for? Consensus can be used to populate a smaller template. Kresock ( talk) 01:41, 30 July 2008 (UTC) reply

The background here is that somebody wanted to add a few names to the {{ Gettysburg Campaign}} template, got frustrated that we wanted to discuss them on that talk page first, so started up his own template to spite us. Other editors have been adding lots of additional links. I think that when the list of entries is so long, a category is more appropriate than a template like this. However, I don't think it's appropriate to have a category such as Participants in the Battle of Gettysburg because then people will be asking for similar categories for their other favorite battles (or will insist upon subcategories for Union, Confederate, or civilian) and things will get out of hand. My ultimate recommendation would be to retire this template and expand the original Gettysburg template a tiny amount, but then more policing of the content would be required to avoid excess. Hal Jespersen ( talk) 16:18, 30 July 2008 (UTC) reply

I proceeded with the long overdue change to last names, it reduced the size of the visible list by almost half. It seems to present better now. Accurizer ( talk) 01:03, 13 July 2013 (UTC) reply

This navigation tool dwarfs the size of any other single page element on most pagespace. Because of this, I've set the state parameter to collapsed. BusterD ( talk) 00:32, 22 April 2009 (UTC) reply