Editing User:Pharap/Wiki Improvement Proposals (section)

=== Sic Template ===

{{
User:Pharap/Templates/Improvement Proposal Box
|reference=IP-005
|type=Template
|status=Unimplemented
}}

==== Summary ====

At the moment the {{tl|sic}} template merely produces a box with a link to Wikipedia, roughly appearing as &#91;''[[w:sic|sic]]''&#93;. The template accepts word fragments, but doesn't do anything useful with them.

I would like to propose an alternative implementation of {{tl|sic}} that would be based on [https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page UESP]'s [https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Template:Sic implementation] of {{tl|sic}}. Specifically, it would accept the verbatim text and a corrected form, and provide the corrected form as hover text that appears when the incorrect word is hovered over with the reader's cursor.

(A surplus of examples can be found in the [https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Bloodmoon:Airship_Captain%27s_Journal Bloodmoon:Airship Captain's Journal] article.)

I would also propose that the revised {{tl|sic}} link to an internal article on the wiki rather than externally linking to Wikipedia, to avoid the generation of the <span class="extiw" style="padding: 8px;"></span>&nbsp;icon, which clutters the page. The most obvious candidate at the moment would be the [[GoArch:Style_guide#Quotations|Quotations]] section of the style guide.

==== Reasoning ====

Merely highlighting that a word is incorrect is of limited use and provides only half the information necessary to understand the problem, relying on the reader to inuit both what the problem actually is and what the correct text should be.

Providing a correction not only informs the reader of what the text should have said, but helps them to recognise why the incorrect text is incorrect.

==== Example ====

Examples:
* <code><nowiki>{{User:Pharap/Templates/Sic|Whark|Wahrk}}</nowiki></code> → {{User:Pharap/Templates/Sic|Whark|Wahrk}}
* <code><nowiki>{{User:Pharap/Templates/Sic|Ghen|Gehn}}</nowiki></code> → {{User:Pharap/Templates/Sic|Ghen|Gehn}}
* "<code><nowiki>{{User:Pharap/Templates/Sic|Muphry|Murphy|link=no}}'s law</nowiki></code>" → "{{User:Pharap/Templates/Sic|Muphry|Murphy|link=no}}'s law"

To provide a more concrete example, [[Reference:Gehn, Lab journal|Gehn's Lab Journal]] incorrectly says "discreet" instead of "discrete", and at present that looks like discreet {{sic|[discrete]}}. With the proposed change, it would appear as (something more like) {{User:Pharap/Templates/Sic|discreet|discrete}}.

==== Implementation ====

A functional implementation can be viewed at <code><nowiki>{{</nowiki>[[User:Pharap/Templates/Sic]]<nowiki>}}</nowiki></code>.