From: "Jeff Raymond" jeff.raymond@internationalhouseofbacon.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] The Madness of King Infobox Date: Fri, 18 May 2007 13:40:46 -0700 (PDT)
For heaven's sake, you never call someone's voice their instrument.
Ever.
The terminology is nonsensical. Again, the box just does not fit.
To be fair, as a music student and vocal major in college for a time, our voices were consistently referred to as instruments.
No clue if it's widespread, but it's not as nonsensical to me as it appears to you.
The problems these bioboxes are causing are very widespread. You simply cannot twist the article beyond all boundaries of accuracy, correct terminology and common sense just to fit an infobox. Infoboxes are supposed to be a means to an end, not an end in themselves.
What's frustrating the most is that the boxes don't break if you fail to include information. So no one ''has'' to put something for country of origin or instrument or party or anything else, and the box is still good.
There are constructive ways to deal with things, folks. I'm not directing this at who wrote what I'm quoting, but it seems like, more and more often, the path of least resistance is being ignored.
-Jeff
-- If you can read this, I'm not at home.
Yes and no - actually, reading some WP articles it seems that the voice is sometimes called an instrument, though I've never come across that in the UK (where I am). Seems rather odd to call Christiana Aguilera's voice her instrument, and I've never seen it done before. Oh, well.
Agreed with point 2, but only partially. On the Paderewski article, it was the main information provided by the box that was causing problems, not some small chunk that you could lop off. Check out some previous revisions.
At best, the things tend to be redundant, by simply duplicating what's already in the article. Sure, they sometimes act as a summary, but often too much gets compressed. One infobox described Beethoven's genre as "Classical, Romantic". I know that brevity is a virtue, but surely that's going too far!
Moreschi
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