"Peter Ansell" ansell.peter@gmail.com writes <snip>
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).
Well they often are, and they can't. Or rather, they aren't very good with anything that isn't simple, and in lots of areas things are rarely simple. Give people an infobox with fields to be filled in and, no surprises here, they'll be filled in sooner or later. The basic biographical infobox, {{Infobox Person}}, has fields for place and date of birth and death, and so do the endless variants. These are a perpetual temptation for the well-intentioned wikignome to spend ten seconds googling and fill in something. Metadata, such as {{Persondata}}, has the same problem.
Readers may like infoboxes - perhaps a sample size of one-ish is a bit small to be sure - but the info they contain may not always be a fair representation of what the article actually says. Infoboxes are poor at complicated subjects like "where and when was Charlemagne born?", "when did Saint Patrick die?", but they get used for it all the same. Even something like "when was William Shakespeare born?" gets mangled when the nice, neat, square peg of knowing his baptismal date is battered into the round hole of adding his birth date to a template.
Infoboxes are designed with the assumption that there's a True answer. But often there's no simple answer to questions like "born when?" and "died when?". When combined with the seemingly endless stream of editors who'd sooner add a date than read what the article says, this can get tedious, although nobody's yet added St Pat's birth date in 2008. Even wikimarkup has the same problem of failing to handle imprecise dates correctly based on user preferences unless they are spelled out in full: "... born between [[23 April]] [[1141]] and [[24 May]] [[1141]]....". But who considers the data that fields might hold when designing templates? And why would dates ever be imprecise?
You know, I don't think I like infoboxes very much.
Angus
On 1/21/08, Angus McLellan angusmclellan@gmail.com wrote:
Even wikimarkup has the same problem of failing to handle imprecise dates correctly based on user preferences unless they are spelled out in full: "... born between [[23 April]] [[1141]] and [[24 May]] [[1141]]....". But who considers the data that fields might hold when designing templates? And why would dates ever be imprecise?
A meta-template approach would be ideal for handling afterthoughts such as this. For this particular problem, {{birth date and age}} and related templates could be modified to gracefully handle ranges or approximate time frames in the less common case where the exact date isn't known to us.
—C.W.
On 22/01/2008, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/21/08, Angus McLellan angusmclellan@gmail.com wrote:
Even wikimarkup has the same problem of failing to handle imprecise dates correctly based on user preferences unless they are spelled out in full: "... born between [[23 April]] [[1141]] and [[24 May]] [[1141]]....". But who considers the data that fields might hold when designing templates? And why would dates ever be imprecise?
A meta-template approach would be ideal for handling afterthoughts such as this. For this particular problem, {{birth date and age}} and related templates could be modified to gracefully handle ranges or approximate time frames in the less common case where the exact date isn't known to us.
That's the sort of thing I mean by fixing the plumbing but avoiding changing the interface (the top-level templates you drop into an article to put in an infobox). People will complain about a change to the visible templates they use, but adding features to the plumbing underneath shouldn't create a fuss if they don't break stuff - any more than all the horrors^Wwonders possible with parser functions broke old wikitext.
- d.
On 1/22/08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
That's the sort of thing I mean by fixing the plumbing but avoiding changing the interface (the top-level templates you drop into an article to put in an infobox). People will complain about a change to the visible templates they use, but adding features to the plumbing underneath shouldn't create a fuss if they don't break stuff - any more than all the horrors^Wwonders possible with parser functions broke old wikitext.
Indeed, but for the infobox question we will probably need to upgrade every faucet (though they will initially have the same appearance) in order to reap the benefits of the new plumbing. Then when a problem arises which is common to all infoboxes we may be able to fix it in one edit.
—C.W.