Gwern Branwen wrote:
On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 8:09 AM, Andrew Gray wrote:
On another note, wow. I hadn't realised how much stuff was in our infoboxes. The five lines of government I can understand, the two GDPs ditto, but do we really need a quick-reference for "proportion of area which is water", the Gini coefficient, or the side of the road it uses? --
- Andrew Gray
All of those are pretty interesting things - what side of the road tells you both historical information, and also is terribly practical if you're there*; Gini coefficient is an excellent concise indicator of economic & political development; and water-proportion affects recreation, economic focuses, and historical course. Given the minimal space they take up and their subordinate position, I don't see much ground for complaining.
- Although one certainly hopes that anyone driving in a particular
country will not need Wikipedia to tell them something like this!
It is easy to argue that any specific factoid is significant about the subject, and that it should thus be included in an infobox, but the present issue is a broader one about how many factoids can an infobox contain without degradation of its usefulness. The primary infobox for a subject needs to be limited to the most important information which the average reader is most likely to seek, and which he can find in a predictable place. I don't have much basis to make a specific recommendation about how many factoids a primary box should contain, but a good rule of thumb might be: If you need to scroll to see it all, it's probably too long.
That said, nothing in this prevents separate secondary infoboxes. If it is agreed that per capita GNP for a country belongs in its primary infobox, nothing prevents having a secondary box containing a broader selection of economic indicators.
Ec