Wikipedia talk:Dynamic infobox templates
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[edit] General comments about WP:DIT
Much better. It's less opinionated, better written, deals more with the appropriate use of optional fields, and it comes off less authoritative then WP:ACT. However, I do think a warning should be added cautioning template editors not to get carried away with optional fields — as Netoholic has complained in the previously mentioned proposal. After all, it is not appropriate to make every field optional.--TheFarix 02:45, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
- That's probably true—although I've seen cases where only a few fields are required and the rest are optional (this is more an issue with infoboxes intended for historical topics, where the lost information problem really comes into play). Maybe some more general advice about how to select which fields should be optional and so forth would be even better. —Kirill Lokshin 03:09, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
- Agreed, this is much much better. Regarding whether or not to make each field optional, the only reason I think it's a good idea is because editors may not have all the information available (but they may have some information). If they can't fill it all in, they should be able to fill in as much as they can, and leave the rest to future editors (in this way, individual editors will fill in each missing piece as they come across the article). The alternatives are to not have a box even partially filled in (meaning we may lose out on that editors knowledge/piece of the puzzle), or worse, have editors who copy and paste the Wiki-markup directly into the article, omitting the data they're not aware of. Anyways, looks good so far, I'll keep this watchlisted. =) —Locke Cole • t • c 19:19, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
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- I think that the work at {{Infobox University}} is an excellent example of where multiple forked templates were brought together into a single cohesive infobox and shows use of optional parameters. How they are made optional is another issue, but it was a good bit of work. Does anyone know of widely used infoboxes that do not use optional parameters? --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 19:48, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] mdashes
Is there any particular reason why the mdashes in the General advice section, or anywhere else in the proposal, shouldn't be unicoded? --TheFarix (Talk) 03:45, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
- Feel free to convert them; I just use the HTML entities because it's faster for me to type them than to go hunting through the symbol box for the right one ;-) —Kirill Lokshin 03:46, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Ultimate status
Am I right in thinking the goal for this should be a style guideline? —Locke Cole • t • c 04:38, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
- I was thinking a regular guideline, actually, since we're only making broad comments about style rather than giving lots of specific rules. I could be wrong about this, though. —Kirill Lokshin 04:43, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
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- It would be hard not to talk a little about style when providing guidelines about when a field could be made optional. However, I believe the goal of this guideline to get encourage template editors to think more about the contents of a dynamic infobox while at the same time avoiding the "Editors are using this badly, so stop using it!" logic of both WP:AUM and WP:ACT. --TheFarix (Talk) 12:42, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
