• I dabbed the link to Henry Russell so it points to Henry Russell (athlete) instead of the dab page, but on Henry Russell, the Whatlinkshere page still has all the pages containing this template listed, and they don't have any other links to Henry Russell outside the template. Anyone know whats going on? Jdcooper 04:22, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Its fine now, either wikipedia or I was having a funny five minutes, no worries.. Jdcooper 17:04, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
    • This template obviously doesn't work as it should now. Guaca 18:25, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

      Looks OK to me. What is the problem you're seeing? -- Rick Block (talk) 19:10, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

Why are the year links directed to one athlete only? (For example, "1996" points to Robert Esmie.) This doesn't seem to make any sense! --RFBailey (talk) 01:21, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

I changed the year links so they link to the appropriate row in 4×100 metres relay at the Olympics. For example, for 1912 the link was Great Britain. This change was reverted so the link is to the "country at the yyyy Olympics" article, e.g. for 1912 the link is Great Britain.

IMO, the event specific link is WAY more on point. If someone is clicking this link they're currently on the page of one of the individuals on a winning 4x100m relay team, so my assumption is they're probably interested in either the other members of that team or other individuals from winning teams in other years. What is the rationale for linking to the generic "country at the yyyy Olympics" article? Is the assumption is that the reader is interested in how the country did at other events during that year's Olympics? If so, this is achievable with 2 clicks (the row in the event article has this link). If the reader is actually interested in the event (say, the other members of the winning team), how do they get there if the link is the country article? -- Rick Block (talk) 18:17, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

They get there by using the {{Olympics4x100metres}} template instead, which is specifically designed for that purpose. This template already provides links to the athlete's team mates as standard. The medals are won by the national teams, so it makes sense to link them as the winning entity. I don't see much advantage in having a navigation template that has 23 section links to the article that is already prominently linked in the box title. The point of a navbox is that it should link to other articles, not repeatedly to the same article. SFB 21:15, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

Walk me through this. I'm looking at, say Vladimir Krylov. I open up the template. I see the US won in 1992. Who was on the winning relay team that year? Your method is I realize the title bar of the template is a link to an article about the event, which I click (ignoring the link right next to the year I'm interested in), and then scanning down the event article I eventually see a table which I have to scan through to find the year I'm interested in. My method is I click the link and get to the right row in the table immediately. The links happen to be to the same article, but they are distinctly different. The point of a navbox is to be useful. I think the probability that I want to see United States at the 1992 Summer Olympics when clicking this link is nearly 0. The context is clearly 4x100m champions. Linking to the country article completely loses the context. -- Rick Block (talk) 02:09, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

@Rick Block: The nub of the issue you raise suggests a preference of returning to the previous format for this template you removed in 2006 where all the champions were listed (see here). I think that a good change to just show the team mates of that year which improves link relevance and reduce the amount of space used. I do understand your point about relevance of the team articles – maybe these would be better linked to the main "Country at the Olympics" pages so the navbox would show all the winning teams for that nation on that page? I still think linking 24 times to the same article is missing the very purpose of navigation templates. SFB 18:26, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

@Sillyfolkboy: So, let's compare this with {{Footer Olympic Champions 100 m Men}}. This is a completely analogous template. Its links go to the articles for the pages of the individuals who won the event, not the "team" (meaning the country). The difference is that there is no article for the set of individuals who won the relay race, while for an individual event there is an article for the winning individual. Isn't the link to the appropriate row in the relay event article much more like the link to the individual's article for an individual event? The "country" won the event in both cases. Why should a link from a template for a relay event be so different from a link for an individual event? To be analogous to individual events, the links here should be to an article about the "<year> <country> 4x100m men's relay team". The issue is that these articles don't exist. Would you prefer linking to these as if they were articles (and creating redirects to the specific row in the event article)? How about linking the year, rather than the country name? -- Rick Block (talk) 05:45, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

@Rick Block: We do have one article for the national relay team entity in the form of Italian national track relay team, but that is a real outlier. We do have a couple of targets like United States national athletics team. I agree the perfect target does not exist, but I think linking the country's Olympic performance is a more value-adding link that a link to a section of an article that we've already prominently linked. SFB 06:51, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

It would appear we're not going to agree here. Can we get comments from anyone else? -- Rick Block (talk) 15:32, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

I was thinking the same, as there is merit to both arguments but it's an impasse between just two of us. I've notified the tagged projects. SFB 13:31, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

I see no reason why this footer shouldn't mimic {{Footer Olympic Champions 4x400 m Men}}, {{Footer Olympic Champions 4x100 m Women}} and {{Footer Olympic Champions 4x400 m Women}}, all of which list the individual team members for all years rather than relying on a subpage and an extra parameter to trigger such a list for a single year. I find those much more handy, and they answer Rick Block's question of "who was on the winning relay team in year X?" with no extra clicks at all. Sideways713 (talk) 16:58, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

I guess I'm coming around to this viewpoint as well. The original idea (in 2006) was to create a footer template that wasn't a huge navbox (that would grow even huger every 4 years). I still think these are monstrosities - but they're extremely common now and show/hide seems to be better supported across browsers. -- Rick Block (talk) 23:30, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

My preference is for Sideway's suggestion of inclusion of the individual names that make up a team. The trace through method is too cumbersome to find information, particularly quickly. And really, the purpose of footers is they are supposed to be an aid to finding information. Trackinfo (talk) 20:54, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

• @Rick Block: I'll take this as a rough consensus to return to the "all links shown" format for relay champion footers. SFB 20:55, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Agree. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:34, 9 September 2014 (UTC)