[WikiEN-l] Readers like infoboxes

[Bryan Derksen]

From: Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com>
> > WikiProjects that have rejected infoboxes...
> 
> They have?  Whaffo?  (Oh, wait, I can guess.  
> "This subject is far
> too broad and multifaceted to be crammed into stylized templates.
> Readers will be better served and will gain a deeper understanding
> by gleaning the information they seek from prose paragraphs."
> Classic serve-the-server, as opposed to serve-the-customer.)

One of Wikipedia's big advantages, IMO, has been that it's written by the same people who are reading it. That means that in theory we tend to focus on the stuff that actually matters to our readers, optimizing our coverage and the degree of effort spent.

Unfortunately as Wikipedia's syntax becomes more complex and as our internal heirarchy becomes more rigid I worry that we're losing that to a large degree. The recent mass blanking of television episode articles, for example, doesn't strike me as the sort of thing that is done to benefit the _reader_ in any meaningful way. And we still don't have anonymous article creation functionality back.

Using meta-templates to simplify the creation of complex templates such as infoboxes seems like one way to ameliorate this problem, albeit a minor one.