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

[Carcharoth]

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 4:49 PM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?
>>
> 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.

I think the point is that some people find them distracting, so the
information could be organised better. A good infobox acts as a
summary for the most-needed and salient information. Other data
should, technically, be relegated to other infoboxes on subarticles,
while still retaining some way of presenting all the data in one place
for those who want that as well.

It's not easy to work out what the balance should be, nor to organise
the mass of available data on a country. When wanting examples of
bloated infoboxes, I tend to look at chemical elements and planets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

Though actually, the thing that annoys me most about infoboxes is that
if there is one bit of data I'm looking for, it invariably isn't
there. I then Google it (though I should really find the time to add
it to the Wikipedia article).

Here is a test. Imagine you are looking for a rough value for the
diameter of the Earth. Try finding it quickly in our article on the
Earth. How long does it take you to find the value you want, and what
distracts you along the way? Did you find what you wanted in the
infobox or in the text of the article?

Do the same to find a rough value for the Earth-Sun and Earth-Moon distances.

Is this information easy to find? Is it presented in an accessible way?

Try using out Earth article to find out that a rough value for the
Earth-Sun distance is. It's roughly 150 million km as any bright
schoolchild will tell you, but in our Wikipedia article, that is
buried deep in the article and in the infobox it is presented as three
orbital characteristics (aphelion, perihelion, semi-major axis).

Maybe the answer is that Wikipedia doesn't do "rough" answers, but I
know other websites that present such data in more accessible ways.
Try finding, on Wikipedia, a table showing the distances of the
planets from the Sun. It seems to be here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_objects_in_hydrostatic_equilibrium

Incidentally, the Earth-Moon distance is in the first sentence of Moon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon

And wonders of wonders, it includes "about thirty times the diameter
of the Earth" - which makes the data accessible and informative. :-)

[Both "Moon" and "Earth" are featured articles, btw.]

Carcharoth