Marc Riddell wrote:
On 9/9/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
IMO, an article should contain most information in the prose. The infobox is a place for a summary of quick facts, and perhaps for statistics that would make for dry reading in the article itself.
on 9/9/07 9:00 AM, Steve Bennett at stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
I'd lean towards repeating material in both. There are lots of downstream uses of Wikipedia text that will have trouble processing infoboxes. Best to have it in the text as well. But succession information, flags, maps, categorisation etc can all just be in the infobox.
I agree with you, Steve. As perhaps a side issue, one thing I am finding more and more is a conflict between the data in the main section of an Article and its infobox. Mostly such items as birth and death dates, places of birth and death, dates in office, etc. This forces me to check the sources, and, where there aren't any in some cases, find my own.
Marc Riddell
Back in my software development days, that was a bit of wisdom: if the software documentation disagrees with the software itself, assume both are wrong. Seems to apply here as well.
-Rich