[WikiEN-l] The Madness of King Infobox

[Andrew Gray]

On 18/05/07, Christiano Moreschi <moreschiwikiman at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:

> Yes and no - actually, reading some WP articles it seems that the voice is
> sometimes called an instrument, though I've never come across that in the UK
> (where I am). Seems rather odd to call Christiana Aguilera's voice her
> instrument, and I've never seen it done before. Oh, well.

It's fairly common as a classification system hack, as far as I'm
aware - ditto treating various forms of orchestra as specific
"instruments".

> At best, the things tend to be redundant, by simply duplicating what's
> already in the article. Sure, they sometimes act as a summary, but often too
> much gets compressed. One infobox described Beethoven's genre as "Classical,
> Romantic". I know that brevity is a virtue, but surely that's going too far!

There are some subjects where it helps - mainly those where you want
specific technical values or information displayed outside the flow of
text. So it's excellent for, say, chemical elements or planets
(various scientific values), or for countries (basic demographic and
geographic information), or for

For people... well, the basic details should be in the first sentence
anyway (birth, death, occupation/field, nationality), which removes
much of the reason for having a "condensed summary". I'm less
convinced about the need for any more detail in infoboxes outside of
specific sections...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk