Le 9/6/07 5:48 PM, Gregory Maxwell a écrit :
Would it be a bad idea to have a campaign to get the {{Information}} template used on *all* our images?
As is, yes, it is. 'Information' doesn't structure very well the information. I don't understand why we need both 'source' and 'author' fields. 'Author' is confusing: a lot of people (I used to count amongst them), when describing an artwork, think that the field pertains to the author of the said artwork. Ditto with 'Date'. 'Permission' is redundant with the 'licensing' section: the default value is 'see below'... 'Description' turns into a mess when the description is long.
There are better description templates on Commons, such as {{Painting}} or the ones derived from {{Meta information museum}}. These are specific templates, which means the information structure is tailored to the content. {{Meta information museum}} for instance was modelled after real museum captions.
If {{Information}} is truly to become our standard template, it needs serious rethinking. It could be the union of all the specialized fields ('credit line' for a museum exhibit, 'right ascension' and 'declination' for an astronomical image, etc.). This meta-template would be instantiated for specialized cases. The basic instance of this meta-template would just contain a few fields, as is the case now for {{Information}}. Very specialized templates, such as {{Information Glyptothek Munich}}, would contain a dozen fields, maybe more, and could be customized (colour schemes, nicely formatted titles, etc.). This way, a newbie can upload an image and use the default basic instance. Power users can migrate easily to a more sophisticated template, because all fields are the same.
Another possibility is to have a single template which contains all possible fields for all users, very few of them being mandatory and all others being optional. By default, the template would appear with only the mandatory fields. A power user could add as many fields as needed. It's mostly equivalent, except that you loose nice customization possibilities.
Jastrow