[WikiEN-l] Being bold doesn't work anymore, or why our prose is so bad.

[Rich Holton]

Marc Riddell wrote:
>> On 9/9/07, Matthew Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> IMO, an article should contain most information in the prose.  The
>>> infobox is a place for a summary of quick facts, and perhaps for
>>> statistics that would make for dry reading in the article itself.
> on 9/9/07 9:00 AM, Steve Bennett at stevagewp at gmail.com wrote:
> 
>> I'd lean towards repeating material in both. There are lots of
>> downstream uses of Wikipedia text that will have trouble processing
>> infoboxes. Best to have it in the text as well. But succession
>> information, flags, maps, categorisation etc can all just be in the
>> infobox.
>>
> I agree with you, Steve. As perhaps a side issue, one thing I am finding
> more and more is a conflict between the data in the main section of an
> Article and its infobox. Mostly such items as birth and death dates, places
> of birth and death, dates in office, etc. This forces me to check the
> sources, and, where there aren't any in some cases, find my own.
> 
> Marc Riddell
> 
Back in my software development days, that was a bit of wisdom: if the 
software documentation disagrees with the software itself, assume both 
are wrong. Seems to apply here as well.

-Rich