[WikiEN-l] Readers like infoboxes

[Charlotte Webb]

On 1/20/08, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Well, that would in fact require changing pretty much every template
except for the one(s) which is/are already in the Ideal State, if any
exist. Naturally:
1. From the outset, everybody is going to disagree as to the nature of
the Ideal State.
2. "Consensus", if reached, should not be abjectly averse to changes
in the future.
3. Future changes will be less hampered by bureaucratic inertia if
they are easier to implement (and easier to reverse) than the initial
standardization process.

Of course the easiest strategy would be to have all infobox templates
derived from an abstract base class, i.e. a meta-template (which, when
edited, would globally affect all templates inheriting their
properties from it).

—C.W.