[WikiEN-l] An infobox achievement

[Fastfission]

On 5/20/07, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/20/07, Christiano Moreschi <moreschiwikiman at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > The problems start when, as part of the will to brevity, too much gets
> > compressed, and factual accuracy gets shoved aside en route. I'm not trying
> > to knock anyone here, but here are some examples:
> ...
> > I'm not trying to attack anyone here, because I don't feel that it's
> > anyone's fault. The problems are an inevitable offshoot of the will to
> > brevity: trying to stuff square pegs in round holes, trying to compress
> > things that can't accurately be compressed. When this occurs, so will
> > mistakes.
>
> It seems to me that a significant proportion of the times when
> infoboxes don't work well is when they are on articles about people.
> Probably because it's a little impersonal to reduce a human being down
> to a few entries in an infobox.

Exactly.

This, mixed with the fact that those who like to add infoboxes often
do so with a huff of self-righteousness, as if it were a mandated
addition, to articles that they are not regular editors of anyway.

I don't believe every article needs an infobox. I don't believe that
they need to be standard editing equipment. In some cases they work
well. In some they don't. My instinct is that people shouldn't add
them to articles that they don't have some sort of real investment in
-- the sort of investment that will make them realize when an infobox
is vastly oversimplifying (e.g. calling Albert Einstein a "pantheist"
for his religion) and the sort of investment that will make them care
whether or not the infobox, in this specific case, enhances the
article or detracts from it.

But obviously that's not an actionable or even universalizable policy.
In general though I think it is good practice not to get involved on
the aesthetic details of articles which you don't work on much, since
1. they don't matter that much, and 2. if they don't matter that much,
then your view is probably not significantly more important than those
who work on it all the time, and frankly they're the ones who will
have to look at it each time they remove a vandalism.

But I'm sure those who dream of a standardized encyclopedia will disagree.

FF