On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 3:10 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
Personally, I think the focus of this discussion on infoboxes is short-sighted. My personal hope is that Wikidata will actually allow the Wikipedias to use fewer infoboxes (and when they are used, for them to be much smaller). This may sound counter-intuitive, but let me explain...
<opinionated rant> Right now, English Wikipedia suffers from a continually growing plague of infobox cruft. Most articles on Wikipedia now look more like Pokemon cards than Encyclopedia articles. Compare: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wollstonecraft The problem with infoboxes is that they are inherently unencyclopedic. Infoboxes are for viewing data, not for giving a nuanced and comprehensive overview of a subject. In fact they actually detract from that goal. The infobox for George Washington leads me to believe that he had equal allegiance to Britain and the U.S., that he was a Deist Episcopal (which is quite misleading in its simplicity), and that his role as President of the United States was just as important as his role as Delegate to the Second Continental Congress from Virginia. Not to mention the fact that it's nearly 3 pages long! Imagine an infobox like that sitting in http://af.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington.
If we had a repository where people could put all the fact-cruft that they want, they would probably be less tempted to spam the infoboxes with it. And maybe at some point we could even replace infoboxes with a "Data tab" or something similar that gave a full interface to the Wikidata data, but without having it dominate the Wikipedia article (as infoboxes do). I imagine that eventually the Wikidata content on many subjects will exceed the Wikipedia content.
So my personal hope is that Wikidata will eventually allow us to think outside the infobox. Heh, I think I'll make that my new slogan: "Think outside the infobox!" Or maybe "Death to infoboxes! Long live Wikidata!" :) </opinionated rant>
Disclaimer: I'm not directly involved with the Wikidata project, just an interested onlooker.
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