On 21/01/2008, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
From: Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com
WikiProjects that have rejected infoboxes...
They have? Whaffo? (Oh, wait, I can guess. "This subject is far too broad and multifaceted to be crammed into stylized templates. Readers will be better served and will gain a deeper understanding by gleaning the information they seek from prose paragraphs." Classic serve-the-server, as opposed to serve-the-customer.)
One of Wikipedia's big advantages, IMO, has been that it's written by the same people who are reading it. That means that in theory we tend to focus on the stuff that actually matters to our readers, optimizing our coverage and the degree of effort spent.
Unfortunately as Wikipedia's syntax becomes more complex and as our internal heirarchy becomes more rigid I worry that we're losing that to a large degree.
Template syntax, while perfectly logical if you can read it properly, has always been out of the range of the average user. Getting them to use headings and links properly is a reasonable expectation. If there were a WYSIWYG editor it may be nice to include easy to use template mechanisms in it, but before then it seems like a bit of a side issue.
The recent mass blanking of television episode articles, for example,
doesn't strike me as the sort of thing that is done to benefit the _reader_ in any meaningful way. And we still don't have anonymous article creation functionality back.
Wikipedia needs to assert control over its content once in a while. The fact that the majority of most-frequented articles on wikipedia are fiction means nothing to administrators who only care for the project, as opposed to those readers who just use up bandwidth and processing power on the server. It would be quite valuable to the project to wipe out fiction articles as it would save heaps on monthly bandwidth bills.
Using meta-templates to simplify the creation of complex templates such as infoboxes seems like one way to ameliorate this problem, albeit a minor one.
It would be nice to have meta-templates, but it won't help with people who see infoboxes as ugly and not able to portray their POV Truth(tm).
Peter Ansell