[WikiEN-l] Readers like infoboxes

[Angus McLellan]

"Peter Ansell" <ansell.peter at gmail.com> writes
<snip>
> It would be nice to have meta-templates, but it won't help with people
> who see infoboxes as ugly and not able to portray their POV Truth(tm).

Well they often are, and they can't. Or rather, they aren't very good
with anything that isn't simple, and in lots of areas things are
rarely simple. Give people an infobox with fields to be filled in and,
no surprises here, they'll be filled in sooner or later. The basic
biographical infobox, {{Infobox Person}}, has fields for place and
date of birth and death, and so do the endless variants. These are a
perpetual temptation for the well-intentioned wikignome to spend ten
seconds googling and fill in something. Metadata, such as
{{Persondata}}, has the same problem.

Readers may like infoboxes - perhaps a sample size of one-ish is a bit
small to be sure - but the info they contain may not always be a fair
representation of what the article actually says. Infoboxes are poor
at complicated subjects like "where and when was Charlemagne born?",
"when did Saint Patrick die?", but they get used for it all the same.
Even something like "when was William Shakespeare born?" gets mangled
when the nice, neat, square peg of knowing his baptismal date is
battered into the round hole of adding his birth date to a template.

Infoboxes are designed with the assumption that there's a True answer.
But often there's no simple answer to questions like "born when?" and
"died when?". When combined with the seemingly endless stream of
editors who'd sooner add a date than read what the article says, this
can get tedious, although nobody's yet added St Pat's birth date in
2008. Even wikimarkup has the same problem of failing to handle
imprecise dates correctly based on user preferences unless they are
spelled out in full: "... born between [[23 April]] [[1141]] and [[24
May]] [[1141]]....". But who considers the data that fields might hold
when designing templates? And why would dates ever be imprecise?

You know, I don't think I like infoboxes very much.

Angus