From: "Jeff Raymond"
<jeff.raymond(a)internationalhouseofbacon.com>
Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] The Madness of King Infobox
Date: Fri, 18 May 2007 13:40:46 -0700 (PDT)
For heaven's sake, you never call
someone's voice their instrument.
Ever.
The terminology is nonsensical. Again, the box
just does not fit.
To be fair, as a music student and vocal major in college for a time, our
voices were consistently referred to as instruments.
No clue if it's widespread, but it's not as nonsensical to me as it
appears to you.
The problems these bioboxes are causing are very widespread. You simply
cannot twist the article beyond all boundaries of accuracy, correct
terminology and common sense just to fit an infobox. Infoboxes are
supposed
to be a means to an end, not an end in themselves.
What's frustrating the most is that the boxes don't break if you fail to
include information. So no one ''has'' to put something for country of
origin or instrument or party or anything else, and the box is still good.
There are constructive ways to deal with things, folks. I'm not directing
this at who wrote what I'm quoting, but it seems like, more and more
often, the path of least resistance is being ignored.
-Jeff
--
If you can read this, I'm not at home.
Yes and no - actually, reading some WP articles it seems that the voice is
sometimes called an instrument, though I've never come across that in the UK
(where I am). Seems rather odd to call Christiana Aguilera's voice her
instrument, and I've never seen it done before. Oh, well.
Agreed with point 2, but only partially. On the Paderewski article, it was
the main information provided by the box that was causing problems, not some
small chunk that you could lop off. Check out some previous revisions.
At best, the things tend to be redundant, by simply duplicating what's
already in the article. Sure, they sometimes act as a summary, but often too
much gets compressed. One infobox described Beethoven's genre as "Classical,
Romantic". I know that brevity is a virtue, but surely that's going too far!
Moreschi
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