On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 8:13 PM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
What is the best way to organize infobox templates for geographic places, the one used on the French, the Polish, or the Turkish Wikipedia? What are the most important features in use on other languages of Wikipedia, that my language is still missing?
Are these questions of a kind that you sometimes ask yourself? If so, where do you go to find the answers? Are we all just copying ideas from the English Wikipedia? Or inventing our own wheels? Has anybody collected stories of how one project learned something useful from another one?
On nowiki we have done the following (re-inventing of the wheel):
We have a small set of discrete templates as the buildingstones (all names are translated):
Infobox start Infobox single column row Infobox double column row Infobox quadruple column row Infobox image Infobox doubleimage Infobox stop
These buildingstones are then used in a small number of basetemplates, such as;
Infobox biography Infobox transport Infobox geography
These basetemplates has the same general basic setup with the "least common denominator" set of parameters, and a large number (as of now, we have 32 of these) of optional parameters, as shown here for Infobox biography:
Photo Name Full name Born Died etc. etc. Optional quadruple column row #1 Optional double column row #1 Optional single column row #1 Optional quadruple column row #2 Optional double column row #2 Optional single column row #2 this goes on until #32>
If we want a specialized template for team-players, we call the {{Infobox biography}}-template and use the optional parameters to build the infobox as wanted, using the different column-sized rows to construct almost what ever we want.
We also use CSS in all of these to avoid hardcoding style-parameters in the infoboxes and to have a uniform look to the infoboxes. The base-templates have pre-set CSS-classes according to their type (transport, biography, geography etc.). The builingstones have parameters to set CSS-classes on each component of their content, which we also use during the construction of the different infoboxes.
That would mean that for one article, the following inclusions would be present (as an example): Article->1 X Infobox basketballplayer->1 X Infobox team-player->1 X Infobox biography->1 X Infobox start, 1 X Infobox image, n X Infobox single column row, n X Infobox double column row, n X Infobox quadruple row, 1 X Infobox stop This makes our onwiki maintenance much more manageable and makes our infoboxes have a uniform look (which can easily be changed in CSS with standardized classnames etc.) and as per [[WP:PERF]] I don't worry about the performance.. ;)
As for reusing raw data between infoboxes and articles, we are using more and more centralized #switch-based templates, acting like small databases. as long as there are no other ways to reuse data like this, we have to do with this type of (ab)use, and as per [[WP:PERF]] I don't worry about the performance (though I'm not happy having to wait ~1 minute for a page to render (this is an extreme situation, not used in a "real" article) ;)
/Stigmj