The visual way the content is displayed should not be controversial. It only gets complicated if the developers/designers start making editorial-decisions about *what information* should be inside the infobox (without tons of input from the editors). Ie. * Changing the look would be relatively easy. (Making the sections/items/images/captions clearer, changing the box design including header-background-color, etc)
* Changing the method for entering infobox-content might be complicated, depending on how much editors have to learn new workflows, or overhaul millions of existing pages. But it should be achievable, because there's a wide agreement that having ~100 lines of template code at the top of articles is not ideal. (We could change this fairly easily, e.g. with subpage transclusion but...:
* Changing where the infomation is stored is very complicated, because anything that separates content from the central page that the editors are watchlisting, suddenly becomes a lot more susceptible to vandalism/inaccuracy, due to lack of scrutiny. There is an option in Special:preferences to "Show Wikidata edits in your watchlist" - but I find using this tends to be a bit annoying, because of the uninformative edit-summaries and lack of navpopups support for diff-links (so I have visit every change, to see what it did).
* Changing what information is included in an article/infobox, should be left in the hands of the editors. (With discussion encouraged, and change being possible; but it would need to be a very well-researched and cross-wiki discussion)
I would suggest that as a first step: someone needs to do a deep-dive into exactly how many items there are in https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q16 vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada 's (infobox) etc: for a handful of topics, and language-projects.
(exhaustion disclaimer. Jet-lagged and not thinking clearly)
On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 2:44 PM, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
Infoboxes cause a huge problem on mobile and I've been asking us to be guinea pigs for this sort of thing.
I would like mobile to scrub infoboxes and then generate them in a more appropriate place in the UI using Wikidata. I was told this would be controversial though...
On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 2:26 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
Just an idea inspired by Brandon's Wikimania talk and some discussions at Wikidata-L: We can completely remove infobox templates. More precisely,
the
templates may stay, but the code that places them in the article can be removed.
Let me explain: Wikidata makes it possible to write an infobox without
any
parameters - just {{Infobox settlement}} without any |, = and all that. Wikidata even has a property called "infobox's main topic", a kind of "meta-property" that can automatically identify which infobox does the article need, so that you can simply say something like {{Infobox}}.
This is
implemented in the Russian Wikipedia using https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:Universal_infocard , which is used
on
hundreds of articles there. So it hasn't replaced the usual templates
yet,
but the theoretical possibility is there.
Thus, the only thing left to the editor's discretion is where to place
the
infobox.
This, however, can be handled by Winter. Winter puts infobox-like information on the info rail*, and if we plan to be bold enough to take
it
completely out of the article's prose flow, why not just remove it from
the
article completely? If an article has an appropriate infobox template,
it is
shown on the info rail, and that is it. (The Community will then ask for
the
__NOINFOBOX__ magic word, but that's a minor thing.)
Thoughts?
- That's how I call the "right rail" until there is consensus on a better
name. See http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/design/2014-August/001897.html
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
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-- Jon Robson
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