Module talk:Taglink

Return usable result when no page exists

Hi Wynndale, I have been maintaining the cuisine page and its tables and templates. Last summer, you replaced [[{{{cuisine:key|{{LL|1=Key:cuisine}}}}} | cuisine]] in the tables with {{ keylink | cuisine }}. This is much easier to maintain and also is apparently faster, so I would like to do the same for the value link. However Module:Taglink returns error text if the page doesn't exist. Most of the cuisine values don't have pages yet so it's really not possible to use Template:Valuelink right now.

It looks like it would be possible to return the English page name when the data item doesn't exist, just like what happens if the number of pages is 0. But since this module is widely used I don't want to make the change without discussing it first. Do you think this is a good idea? Thanks. --Graptemys (talk) 19:32, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

There are two reasons not to have a data item corresponding to the link text: the link was mistyped and should be corrected, or (until the bot to do this automatically comes back) the tag is a new one and a corresponding data item needs to be created. I see no help from a default link in either case. -- Andrew (talk) 20:02, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

There are almost 200 cuisines listed on the wiki right now, and maybe half of them have wiki pages and data items. Do you think that pages should be created for all of them? Most would probably have no extra information, just a description (already on the main page), and some automatically generated statistics. Maybe this is unique to cuisines where there is such a large number of de facto values but it seems intractable to me to keep all of them up to date. Even if we do this work, I am afraid that as new cuisines become popular and get added to the wiki, editors with no knowledge of data items will copy and paste a new row in the table, then get an error because the cuisine doesn't have a data item, then not go through with the change. So how can we get the benefits of Template:Valuelink without getting blocked by managing hundreds of data items? --Graptemys (talk) 20:39, 27 January 2023 (UTC)