[Commons-l] The great {{Information}} campaign

[Jastrow]

Le 9/6/07 5:48 PM, Gregory Maxwell a écrit :
> 
> Would it be a bad idea to have a campaign to get the {{Information}}
> template used on *all* our images?

As is, yes, it is. 'Information' doesn't structure very well the 
information. I don't understand why we need both 'source' and 'author' 
fields. 'Author' is confusing: a lot of people (I used to count amongst 
them), when describing an artwork, think that the field pertains to the 
author of the said artwork. Ditto with 'Date'. 'Permission' is redundant 
with the 'licensing' section: the default value is 'see below'... 
'Description' turns into a mess when the description is long.

There are better description templates on Commons, such as {{Painting}} 
or the ones derived from {{Meta information museum}}. These are specific 
templates, which means the information structure is tailored to the 
content. {{Meta information museum}} for instance was modelled after 
real museum captions.

If {{Information}} is truly to become our standard template, it needs 
serious rethinking. It could be the union of all the specialized fields 
('credit line' for a museum exhibit, 'right ascension' and 'declination' 
for an astronomical image, etc.). This meta-template would be 
instantiated for specialized cases. The basic instance of this 
meta-template would just contain a few fields, as is the case now for 
{{Information}}. Very specialized templates, such as {{Information 
Glyptothek Munich}}, would contain a dozen fields, maybe more, and could 
be customized (colour schemes, nicely formatted titles, etc.). This way, 
a newbie can upload an image and use the default basic instance. Power 
users can migrate easily to a more sophisticated template, because all 
fields are the same.

Another possibility is to have a single template which contains all 
possible fields for all users, very few of them being mandatory and all 
others being optional. By default, the template would appear with only 
the mandatory fields. A power user could add as many fields as needed. 
It's mostly equivalent, except that you loose nice customization 
possibilities.

Jastrow