Almost just in time for the recent debate about whether adding infoboxes to articles is a good idea, I've made an achievement in that regard: I just completed the task of adding infoboxes to every top level domain (generic, country-code, proposed, reserved, etc.). I originally created the "Infobox TLD" a couple of years ago, and it's taken this long to get to all of the TLDs (especially the country code domains, of which there are hundreds), but I finally completed it (without the existence of any formal WikiProject on the subject). The last one I got to was .vi, for the U.S. Virgin Islands. Now, the question is, did I improve or degrade the articles thereby?
In general, I feel that infoboxes are good in most cases where there are dry statistics that probably need a table anyway.
-Matt
From: "Matthew Brown" morven@gmail.com
Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] An infobox achievement Date: Sun, 20 May 2007 02:05:34 -0700
In general, I feel that infoboxes are good in most cases where there are dry statistics that probably need a table anyway.
-Matt
Amen.
This, I feel, is a good use of an infobox. It's statistics, there's little room for ambiguity, and you can compress things into tables without losing out on factual accuracy.
The problems start when, as part of the will to brevity, too much gets compressed, and factual accuracy gets shoved aside en route. I'm not trying to knock anyone here, but here are some examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ludwig_van_Beethoven&oldid=121...
The infobox says that this was when he was born. No. It's when he was baptised.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Castle_of_Otranto&oldid=12...
You can read Geogre's entertaining account of the problems with that one on the talk.
Then the infamous Paderewski example: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ignacy_Jan_Paderewski&oldid=13...
Two boxes?
I'm not trying to attack anyone here, because I don't feel that it's anyone's fault. The problems are an inevitable offshoot of the will to brevity: trying to stuff square pegs in round holes, trying to compress things that can't accurately be compressed. When this occurs, so will mistakes.
Oh, these things get fixed eventually, but there's no reason for us to present inaccurate information at any time. We need to be careful of this.
Moreschi
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On 5/20/07, Christiano Moreschi moreschiwikiman@hotmail.co.uk wrote:
The problems start when, as part of the will to brevity, too much gets compressed, and factual accuracy gets shoved aside en route. I'm not trying to knock anyone here, but here are some examples:
...
I'm not trying to attack anyone here, because I don't feel that it's anyone's fault. The problems are an inevitable offshoot of the will to brevity: trying to stuff square pegs in round holes, trying to compress things that can't accurately be compressed. When this occurs, so will mistakes.
It seems to me that a significant proportion of the times when infoboxes don't work well is when they are on articles about people. Probably because it's a little impersonal to reduce a human being down to a few entries in an infobox.
On 5/20/07, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/20/07, Christiano Moreschi moreschiwikiman@hotmail.co.uk wrote:
The problems start when, as part of the will to brevity, too much gets compressed, and factual accuracy gets shoved aside en route. I'm not trying to knock anyone here, but here are some examples:
...
I'm not trying to attack anyone here, because I don't feel that it's anyone's fault. The problems are an inevitable offshoot of the will to brevity: trying to stuff square pegs in round holes, trying to compress things that can't accurately be compressed. When this occurs, so will mistakes.
It seems to me that a significant proportion of the times when infoboxes don't work well is when they are on articles about people. Probably because it's a little impersonal to reduce a human being down to a few entries in an infobox.
Exactly.
This, mixed with the fact that those who like to add infoboxes often do so with a huff of self-righteousness, as if it were a mandated addition, to articles that they are not regular editors of anyway.
I don't believe every article needs an infobox. I don't believe that they need to be standard editing equipment. In some cases they work well. In some they don't. My instinct is that people shouldn't add them to articles that they don't have some sort of real investment in -- the sort of investment that will make them realize when an infobox is vastly oversimplifying (e.g. calling Albert Einstein a "pantheist" for his religion) and the sort of investment that will make them care whether or not the infobox, in this specific case, enhances the article or detracts from it.
But obviously that's not an actionable or even universalizable policy. In general though I think it is good practice not to get involved on the aesthetic details of articles which you don't work on much, since 1. they don't matter that much, and 2. if they don't matter that much, then your view is probably not significantly more important than those who work on it all the time, and frankly they're the ones who will have to look at it each time they remove a vandalism.
But I'm sure those who dream of a standardized encyclopedia will disagree.
FF
On 5/20/2007 10:08 AM, Stephen Bain wrote:
It seems to me that a significant proportion of the times when infoboxes don't work well is when they are on articles about people. Probably because it's a little impersonal to reduce a human being down to a few entries in an infobox.
I liked the people infoboxes a lot more when they just contained the dates and places of birth and death (though I think it be left up to editors of the article to decide if they are aesthetically pleasing on a particular page or not). The people infoboxes that contain more information, like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_Philosopher
don't seem to accomplish much aside from making sweeping generalizations and provoking edit wars over those generalizations.
--Chris