On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 3:10 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)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.