Infobox being broken up into templates, using general css rather than
hardcoding styles?
^_^ This sounds so much like the path I've already taken on Wikia ACG
with iBox, a shared repo of styles, and sync bots...
http://anime.wikia.com/wiki/Template:iBox
Actually on a similar note, the templates I use in the project have
almost no inline styling at all. A class structure is used to create the
various types of styles that are used inside templates. I might need to
document that though.
My equivalent of Wikipedia's "wikitable" is basically:
class="box table colored bordered innerbordered style-basic"
table styling, with coloring bordering and borders inside the cells,
with the "basic" class of styles.
You can easily go and swap style-basic for one of the other color
classes on the wiki.
There are also a number of other styling classes than "table".
"message"
for the numerous messages like protection notices, cleanup notices, and
other section notices."block" for the various big blocks like image
summaries, licensing templates, fair use templates, etc...
And there are a number of color schemes for things like "warning",
"cleanup", and even a "license" class which has sub styles for the
various different groups of licensing templates.
The beauty of it all is how modular the entire thing is. The coloring is
completely generic and independent of what format you use, so you could
go and create an infobox with style-warning and while a little strange
of an idea, it would be styled perfectly fine.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [
http://nadir-seen-fire.com]
-Nadir-Point (
http://nadir-point.com)
-Wiki-Tools (
http://wiki-tools.com)
-MonkeyScript (
http://monkeyscript.nadir-point.com)
-Animepedia (
http://anime.wikia.com)
-Narutopedia (
http://naruto.wikia.com)
-Soul Eater Wiki (
http://souleater.wikia.com)
Stig Meireles Johansen wrote:
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 8:13 PM, Lars Aronsson
<lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote:
What is the best way to organize infobox
templates for geographic
places, the one used on the French, the Polish, or the Turkish
Wikipedia? What are the most important features in use on other
languages of Wikipedia, that my language is still missing?
Are these questions of a kind that you sometimes ask yourself?
If so, where do you go to find the answers? Are we all just
copying ideas from the English Wikipedia? Or inventing our own
wheels? Has anybody collected stories of how one project learned
something useful from another one?
On nowiki we have done the following (re-inventing of the wheel):
We have a small set of discrete templates as the buildingstones (all names
are translated):
Infobox start
Infobox single column row
Infobox double column row
Infobox quadruple column row
Infobox image
Infobox doubleimage
Infobox stop
These buildingstones are then used in a small number of basetemplates, such
as;
Infobox biography
Infobox transport
Infobox geography
These basetemplates has the same general basic setup with the "least common
denominator" set of parameters, and a large number (as of now, we have 32 of
these) of optional parameters, as shown here for Infobox biography:
Photo
Name
Full name
Born
Died
etc. etc.
Optional quadruple column row #1
Optional double column row #1
Optional single column row #1
Optional quadruple column row #2
Optional double column row #2
Optional single column row #2
this goes on until #32>
If we want a specialized template for team-players, we call the {{Infobox
biography}}-template and use the optional parameters to build the infobox as
wanted, using the different column-sized rows to construct almost what ever
we want.
We also use CSS in all of these to avoid hardcoding style-parameters in the
infoboxes and to have a uniform look to the infoboxes. The base-templates
have pre-set CSS-classes according to their type (transport, biography,
geography etc.). The builingstones have parameters to set CSS-classes on
each component of their content, which we also use during the construction
of the different infoboxes.
That would mean that for one article, the following inclusions would be
present (as an example):
Article->1 X Infobox basketballplayer->1 X Infobox team-player->1 X Infobox
biography->1 X Infobox start, 1 X Infobox image, n X Infobox single column
row, n X Infobox double column row, n X Infobox quadruple row, 1 X Infobox
stop
This makes our onwiki maintenance much more manageable and makes our
infoboxes have a uniform look (which can easily be changed in CSS with
standardized classnames etc.) and as per [[WP:PERF]] I don't worry about the
performance.. ;)
As for reusing raw data between infoboxes and articles, we are using more
and more centralized #switch-based templates, acting like small databases.
as long as there are no other ways to reuse data like this, we have to do
with this type of (ab)use, and as per [[WP:PERF]] I don't worry about the
performance (though I'm not happy having to wait ~1 minute for a page to
render (this is an extreme situation, not used in a "real" article) ;)
/Stigmj