On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 4:49 PM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 8:09 AM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
2009/3/3 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
By Hakon Wium Lie of Opera:
http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/
What is the likelihood of making as much as possible CSS? How to make infoboxes degrade gracefully for non-CSS browsers and IE users?
Youch, that's messy in IE7. Lovely though it may be, that 30-50% of our audience would not be happy...
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?
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.
I think the point is that some people find them distracting, so the information could be organised better. A good infobox acts as a summary for the most-needed and salient information. Other data should, technically, be relegated to other infoboxes on subarticles, while still retaining some way of presenting all the data in one place for those who want that as well.
It's not easy to work out what the balance should be, nor to organise the mass of available data on a country. When wanting examples of bloated infoboxes, I tend to look at chemical elements and planets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
Though actually, the thing that annoys me most about infoboxes is that if there is one bit of data I'm looking for, it invariably isn't there. I then Google it (though I should really find the time to add it to the Wikipedia article).
Here is a test. Imagine you are looking for a rough value for the diameter of the Earth. Try finding it quickly in our article on the Earth. How long does it take you to find the value you want, and what distracts you along the way? Did you find what you wanted in the infobox or in the text of the article?
Do the same to find a rough value for the Earth-Sun and Earth-Moon distances.
Is this information easy to find? Is it presented in an accessible way?
Try using out Earth article to find out that a rough value for the Earth-Sun distance is. It's roughly 150 million km as any bright schoolchild will tell you, but in our Wikipedia article, that is buried deep in the article and in the infobox it is presented as three orbital characteristics (aphelion, perihelion, semi-major axis).
Maybe the answer is that Wikipedia doesn't do "rough" answers, but I know other websites that present such data in more accessible ways. Try finding, on Wikipedia, a table showing the distances of the planets from the Sun. It seems to be here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_objects_in_hydrostatic_equ...
Incidentally, the Earth-Moon distance is in the first sentence of Moon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon
And wonders of wonders, it includes "about thirty times the diameter of the Earth" - which makes the data accessible and informative. :-)
[Both "Moon" and "Earth" are featured articles, btw.]
Carcharoth