From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com
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.
In the past six months or so there's been a massive effort to convert navigation boxes over to the standardized {{navbox}} template (and before that was {{navbox generic}}, since subsumed into {{navbox}}. I occasionally run afoul of editors who resist the changeover on their pet navboxes but it's generally gone quite well. Is there any equivalent meta-template for infoboxes? It'll probably be a harder template to come up with since infoboxes have more complex structure than most navboxes but maybe we could start with something relatively simple that can handle the easier cases and work from there.