[WikiEN-l] Readers like infoboxes

[Peter Ansell]

On 21/01/2008, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 21/01/2008, aliasd <wiki4 at da-bom.com> wrote:
>
> > I would like to see infoboxes one day integrated more closely with the
> > Wikipedia UI. It would be great to select an infobox by cat from a dropdown
> > menu, have all the fields displayed form style with optionals marked as so.
> > I think it would be incredibly easy to do without actually editing the
> > infobox syntax. There is a bit of an issue with Infobox duplication and the
> > ability for the novice to integrate infoboxes with articles.
>
>
> I used to think of them as a bit of a blight, but one day realised,
> uh, these are machine-readable information and hence potentially
> vastly useful. The trick would be to standardise the plumbing behind
> them without changing each template - the fields and some of the
> behaviour need standardising.

dbpedia.org make use of infobox information to provide semantic RDF
computer readable representations of wikipedia together with their
other sources. I tried to explain this to the WikiProject Opera and
Classical groups but I was hounded out by POV pushers IMO. I am still
pro infoboxes for all wikipedia articles though.