[WikiEN-l] A proposal to de-table Wikipedia infoboxes
Carcharoth
carcharothwp at googlemail.com
Tue Mar 3 13:21:26 UTC 2009
On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
> 2009/3/3 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
>> By Hakon Wium Lie of Opera:
>>
>> http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/
>>
>> What is the likelihood of making as much as possible CSS? How to make
>> infoboxes degrade gracefully for non-CSS browsers and IE users?
>
> Youch, that's messy in IE7. Lovely though it may be, that 30-50% of
> our audience would not be happy...
>
> On another note, wow. I hadn't realised how much stuff was in our
> infoboxes. The five lines of government I can understand, the two GDPs
> ditto, but do we really need a quick-reference for "proportion of area
> which is water", the Gini coefficient, or the side of the road it
> uses?
Probably yes, but not in a box but in a separate article. I think I
saw one once, a separate article on stats for a country, but I can't
remember where I saw that. When some infoboxes are longer than a small
article, you know something has bloated somewhere.
I looked at United States:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States
And the number of sub-articles is mind-numbingly large. Many of those
have sub-infoboxes, so maybe too much is being put in the main country
infoboxes?
Here we go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
The weather articles are similarly stats- and table-heavy.
I'm sure they are useful, but do people really use them?
Carcharoth
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