[WikiEN-l] A proposal to de-table Wikipedia infoboxes

[Gwern Branwen]

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 8:09 AM, 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?
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray

All of those are pretty interesting things - what side of the road
tells you both historical information, and also is terribly practical
if you're there*; Gini coefficient is an excellent concise indicator
of economic & political development; and water-proportion affects
recreation, economic focuses, and historical course. Given the minimal
space they take up and their subordinate position, I don't see much
ground for complaining.

* Although one certainly hopes that anyone driving in a particular
country will not need Wikipedia to tell them something like this!

-- 
gwern