On 1/20/08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I used to think of them as a bit of a blight, but one day realised, uh, these are machine-readable information and hence potentially vastly useful. The trick would be to standardise the plumbing behind them without changing each template - the fields and some of the behaviour need standardising.
Well, that would in fact require changing pretty much every template except for the one(s) which is/are already in the Ideal State, if any exist. Naturally: 1. From the outset, everybody is going to disagree as to the nature of the Ideal State. 2. "Consensus", if reached, should not be abjectly averse to changes in the future. 3. Future changes will be less hampered by bureaucratic inertia if they are easier to implement (and easier to reverse) than the initial standardization process.
Of course the easiest strategy would be to have all infobox templates derived from an abstract base class, i.e. a meta-template (which, when edited, would globally affect all templates inheriting their properties from it).
—C.W.