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
* http://jonrobson.me.uk
* https://www.facebook.com/jonrobson
* @rakugojon

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