Template talk:Infobox School

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[edit] Documentation

[edit] Purpose

{{infobox School}} — An infobox about a school, other than a university or college. Examples include primary and secondary schools.

[edit] Usage

[edit] Required fields

{{Infobox School
|name = (Official name, in English [page title])
|type = (Public, Private, Secondary, Primary, etc.)
}}

[edit] Optional fields

[edit] Empty syntax

{{Infobox School
|name           = 
|image          = 
|imagesize      = 
|caption        = 
|motto          = 
|established    = 
|type           = 
|affiliation    = 
|district       = 
|grades         = 
|president      = 
|principal      = 
|head of school = 
|dean           = 
|faculty        = 
|staff          = 
|students       = 
|enrollment     = 
|athletics      = 
|conference     = 
|colors         = 
|mascot         = 
|campus type    = 
|campus size    = 
|free_label     = 
|free_text      = 
|free_label2    = 
|free_text2     = 
|free_label3    = 
|free_text3     = 
|location       = 
|country        = 
|information    = 
|website        = 
}}

[edit] Example

George Washington Elementary
In God We Trust
School type	Public
Established	1776
District	District of Columbia Public Schools
Grades	K-12
Principal	Abe Lincoln
Faculty	70
Staff	35
Students	800
Athletics	Football, soccer, hockey
Colors	Red, white, blue
Mascot	Uncle Sam
Newspaper	USA Today
Location	100 Pennsylvania Ave. Washington, D.C. United States
Information	1-800-USA-USA
Website	Link

{{Infobox School
|name           = George Washington Elementary
|image          = George-Washington.jpg
|motto          = In God We Trust
|established    = [[1776]]
|type           = [[Public school|Public]]
|affiliation    = 
|district       = [[District of Columbia Public Schools]]
|grades         = K-12
|president      = 
|principal      = Abe Lincoln
|head of school = 
|dean           = 
|faculty        = 70
|staff          = 35
|students       = 800
|enrollment     = 
|athletics      = Football, soccer, hockey
|conference     = 
|colors         = Red, white, blue
|mascot         = Uncle Sam
|free_label     = Newspaper
|free_text      = ''USA Today''
|free_label2    = 
|free_text2     = 
|location       = 100 Pennsylvania Ave. <br />[[Washington, D.C.]]
|country        = USA
|information    = 1-800-USA-USA
|website        = [http://www.yahoo.com Link]
}}

Note: Line broken for readability.

[edit] History

Added Documentation

--Lc 04 22:23, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion

[edit] Template:Infobox_School_II

What is wrong with the template on Infobox_School_II is there an error because it is really small. John R G 00:44, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Changes by WildCard

I suppose the changes by WildCard were to comply to some standard thus I have not reverted it. However, many pages are dependent on Template:Infobox School and thus they are now broken because of the many substantial changes.

As an interim measure (to prevent editors from having to change the content of the Infobox), I have created a version of the old Infobox at Template:Infobox School II so editors can choose to use the old style -- and switch to the new style when they wish. --Mintchocicecream 02:45, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

I have created Template:Infobox School2 to create a unified infobox for school articles. I believe that my box brings more consistency to WP by being more similar to Template:Infobox Company and Template:Infobox University2. madh 21:18, September 10, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Default image configuration

Shouldn't the images all be the same size and borderless or whatever. Right now we simply determine the image page-by-page, but this can lead to chaos. I propose modifying the page to include the image automatically to whatever size. However, this will involve modifications to every page linking to it. Nicholasink 04:14, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Very true. In most infoboxs, the "image" parameter contains only the filename. -- Netoholic @ 04:37, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Prominent Faculty

What is the purpose of the "Prominent Faculty" field? It seems that very few (high) schools will actually have faculties so notable as to be listed prominently in an infobox. I suggest we replace "Prominent Faculty" with "Faculty", and use that field instead to list the size of the teaching staff. --BenjaminTsai 06:38, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

I've been told the term "faculty" is only used in this context in North America. A more open alternative might be "Teaching staff". -- Netoholic @ 10:40, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

We need to consider that in many cases this will not be a named member of faculty but the number of faculty. i would think if there are two faculty members listed it is redundant to say they are prominent. I removed the word prominent before i saw the talk page here. See what you think? David D. (Talk) 03:31, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

We're using it as the number of faculty on my school's article. Reuvenk 02:00, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Faculty isn't used by the public in Australia, and seldom by teaching staff. Alex Law 05:38, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

How about "Vice Principals"? Sstrieu 07:46, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed additional fields

Some suggestions:

• Religious affiliation, optional
• Pedagogical approach, also optional - could include special needs approaches (e.g., Greenspan, ABA), educational philosophy (e.g., Montessori, Steiner), etc.
• Accreditation, optional
• Member of network, optional - example could be "Solomon Schechter Day School Association"
• Grade levels, required?

--Leifern 14:15, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

More custom sections would be appreciated. I'm afraid of changing the template for fear of messing up many pages. Reuvenk 02:02, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

The University template is using some very sophisticated hidden fields. This might be a way to include more fields with out wrecking the current look for other schools. See the university template for more details. David D. (Talk) 02:40, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Many changes

As you might have noticed, I pretty much revamped the template, adding some new fields, and changing formatting slightly. Along with that I added standard documentation that should make it easier for editors to include in their pages. Please feel free to give me some input, for any possible improvements. Or also to let me know if any of the changes messed up any existing pages. --Lc 04 22:26, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

• The students field does not seem to display with this template. Even in the example provided on this page. Minnaert 20:25, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, you're right. However, the "enrollment" field will place the enrollment number after a Students label. Hoof Hearted 13:51, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

So, what is the students field for if it doesn't work? —Remember the dot (t) 01:55, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

The problem was that the code would ignore the students field if the enrollment field was supplied, even if it was blank. (The {{{param|default}}} construct yields default only if param is undefined, not if it's blank.) I changed it to emit the Students line for either value. (What I did is arguably wrong, as it will emit two Students lines if you've supplied both values, but in that case we don't know what the right answer is and it seemed more important to keep the template code simple.)

It does seem like one or the other field should be deprecated and eventually removed.

Jordan Brown 18:12, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Color swatches

Manual Arts High School had color swatches for its school colors in some unstructured text (looked like it was a remnant of a table). When I created its infobox, I moved the swatches into it. Should this be usual practice? If so, it seems like it'd be good to have something like {{color swatch|C41E3A}} or {{color swatch|C41E3A|Purple}}. (Actually, Template:Color swatch already exists and does sort of the right thing, but the swatch is way too big for this purpose.) Better still might be to add parameters to Infobox School to do this, so it can be standardized. Jordan Brown 05:34, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. Looks like Template:Colorsample is a pretty good match, or perhaps a variant on Template:Swatch-inline. (Swatch-inline would have to have an option to set the text color and an option to supply the text, so that one could say "purple" and then specify a particular hex triplet.) Jordan Brown 06:02, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Gender

I think there should be a standard field to depict if the school is an all boy/girls or mixed school. LeMarsu 09:07, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps this could be added to "Type", so you might end up with "Public, Secondary, Girls". Jordan Brown 16:42, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Image

I particularly like the fact that the image size is now available as a default.

A couple of notes:

If the "imagesize" parameter is to be of the form "123px", that needs to be clear in the documentation. "in px" and "width in pixels" both suggest bare numbers to me - "123" instead of "123px".

Is there any reason why "Image:" style links *shouldn't* be acceptable? If they can be recognized as-is, that would avoid a big pile of cleanup of existing articles.

Jordan Brown 23:04, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your feedback! In general, I tried to model this infobox's method of calling images after other infobox's, such as that of Template:Infobox Person. Giving an answer in units literally means to give it with those units, and have seen that from everywhere. If it's confusing, I'll change the documentation. It would be ideal to not have a double standard for how to code images, so if the backlog is cleared, the code can be made much, much less confusing. Gracenotes^T § 13:55, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Documentation improvement would be good. Adding something like "e.g. 220px" should be sufficient. Jordan Brown 05:14, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Senior Class President: too volatile?

Since (presumably) the Senior Class President changes every year, it seems like it's too volatile to include and should be removed. It seems like it would almost always be stale. Comments? Jordan Brown 22:34, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Agree, and who the senior class president is isn't important anyway, in most cases. -- Robert ^See Hear _Speak 20:57, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

I looked at who added it, and it was added in this edit by User:Nduell, who joined Feb 4 and has 26 edits. Not that that really matters, but for now, I'm removing it. If he wants it back we can discuss it. -- Robert ^See Hear _Speak 21:00, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Mascot image?

I'm trying to convert variants like Template:Infobox US school and Template:Infobox School4 to use Template:Infobox School. I've found one feature in Template:Infobox US school that seems worthwhile but not necessarily a no-brainer: it can include an image of the mascot down in the body of the box. (This is in addition to the image at the top of the box, presumably a picture of the facility.)

See examples at Livingston High School (New Jersey), Plano Senior High School, Plano West Senior High School, and Jericho High School.

Any comments on adding a "mascot image" feature to Template:Infobox School? In-line like Template:Infobox US school does it, or somewhere else?

Jordan Brown 06:48, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Country?

One piece of data that a number of the variant templates call out separately is the country. In the conversions I've been doing so far, I've lumped that into "location", but it seems like separating it might be desirable. (In fact, it's tempting to break down all of the parts of the address, but that's dangerous when you're trying to handle more than one country.) What I'd suggest would be to have a field that takes a 3-letter ISO country code and uses the flag template stuff to expand that into a name and flag icon, e.g. United States, Spain. It'd probably display that at the end of the "Location" field.

Comments?

Jordan Brown 07:12, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Done Jordan Brown 17:05, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

For examples, see Granada Hills High School, Richardson High School, New English School. Jordan Brown 17:09, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

I just added "country" (or moved it from "location", or in a couple of cases cleaned it up) to all of the school articles in my watchlist. I'm sure that there are many more that don't have it, but that's a hundred or two that now do. Perhaps we can have the template auto-categorize the ones that don't specify a country.

Note that because the formatting of the country is handled entirely in the template, it could easily be changed across the board. Don't like the flag icons? Change it to use {{country|name|{{{country}}}}} and it'll show only the name, for all schools.

Note also that a few schools already specified a "country" parameter (even though it didn't do anything). The cases I've seen tended to use a link to the country article for this field. Because of the processing to turn a country code into a flag and country name the results weren't pretty. The fix is to replace the country value with an ISO 3166-1 alpha 3 value. Again, it might be worthwhile to have the template autocategorize anything that isn't a proper country code (as judged by having a country data template).

Jordan Brown 06:30, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Website

What form should the website parameter take? It looks to me like it's supposed to be a plain URL, e.g. "http://myschool.org", but that doesn't really do well when the URL for this particular school is some long and complicated URL to retrieve a particular page from the bowels of the district's server. Should we use the URL anyway, or use Official website, or perhaps just [1]? Standardization? Note that having the row be labelled "official website" and having the content be "official website" seems redundant. Perhaps the school's name should be a link to its web page, with no explicit mention. It sure seems like (a) all school articles should supply the URL in the same way and (b) the URL should always be presented to the user in the same way.

Comments?

Jordan Brown 07:12, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

I would personally use the latter, but not everyone does. We could make a new parameter, sitename, and change every instance of a URL to the plain URL (if it's not plain already) while adding the sitename parameter, and then change the template when every single instance of the parameter has been standardized, but this seems like a bit much. Gracenotes^T § 14:07, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but I'm having trouble understanding what you're proposing. What would this look like to the user, and what values would go into the "website" and "sitename" parameters?

Perhaps you're saying that you'd have the school's name be a link to the school's site, but that because of all of the existing articles where {{{website}}} isn't a bare URL we'd need to transition to that plan using a new parameter {{{sitename}}} that would be defined to be a bare URL?

Jordan Brown 15:40, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Blank imagesize caused problems

I noticed that if a client article supplied a blank imagesize (perhaps because it started with the "empty syntax" example), the image wouldn't display properly.

The problem was that the imagesize defaulting was being done with the parameter-defaulting mechanism {{{imagesize|default}}}, and that only triggers when the parameter is undefined, not when it is blank. I changed it to use a {{#if...}} and now it works OK.

It'd sure be nice if somebody could figure out how to break that block onto multiple lines and indent it to show the structure, to make it more readable. I'm not enough of a template wizard to do it reliably.

Jordan Brown 17:43, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] images in Template:Infobox School

An admin reverted an edit by User:Jdubman to Mission San Jose High School (dif), which clearly had to be done because of how the logo gif was enlarged and distorted. It may be that the infobox design is a problem or that the tag needs to be different for jpgs and gifs--I'm not really able to tell what should be done, but it seems like somebody should go look at the other edited infoboxes.--Hjal 05:46, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm afraid that the editor in question didn't understand the imagesize parameter, which is fine, because it's a bit complicated (but less complicated then the image syntax that was there previously). I'll fix it. Gracenotes^T § 19:24, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Yep. Nyah, nyah, got there first :-) What I did with the ones I updated was to look at the size of the image, and if it was a graphic (vs a photo) under about 250px then I set imagesize to the actual size. Few photos were that small, so I didn't really come up with a pattern. It'd be nice to be able to do some more intelligent tests in the template, but I don't think the template can inspect the actual image size. (Perhaps if there was a way to tell MediaWiki "scale down to 220px, but do not scale up", but there isn't.) Perhaps we should have a way to tell the template to use the native image size, whatever it is. Another issue is that graphics (vs photos) tend to be tall rather than wide, and if you scale them up to 220px wide they are unreasonably tall even if they look OK. Jordan Brown 20:40, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New Sections (Parameters)

Hellow there fellow, aahhhh... "Infoboxers" (lol)! Nice to be apart of the education system of knowledge on Wikipedia. If you are not well aware yet, there has been a few additional sections included in the template. A few of these include: "Originator" and "Contact Number". Both of these new additions were added by myself. Here are my reasons for each:

• Originator: Currently, i am working on a High School known as "Alief Taylor High School". I'm working on this article because, yah, i'm currently going to this school! Wooppty do! Alief Taylor has an "Originator", or the person who the school was named after and basically identified what the school's title will be. There are numerous other schools around the world which were all named after something or someone. If a particular school fits this category, then simply name the Originator using this new section. Yah!

• Contact Number/Fax Number: There "was" a section within the template called "Information", which was too broad. Information about the school is explained within the article itself. Therefore, whatever information included within the template should be general and specific. As a result, i've decided to specify the information to the contact numbers. You can either call the school, or fax the school. It truly is as easy as, 1...2....3!

I plan to add more sections to this template, because i'm starting to work on School articles now! But don't pull your pants down yet, i'll inform you all should i plan to edit any more! Thanks! Gooden 03:34, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

(P.S) If you can provide improvement on the Alief Taylor article, that would be greatly appreciated! Gooden 03:34, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

OK, thanks. You also added "status"; what did you intend that for?

Originator: Personally, I'd call this "named after"; I think that'd be more obvious. (Of course, the value should be the person's name, wikilinked to their article.)

Contact number: Does indeed seem clearer than "information", but we should have a plan for transitioning from one to the other.

Fax number: Hasn't been added yet, at least not as a separate entry. I don't really have a strong feeling on whether or not it's appropriate, but remember that Wikipedia isn't really intended as a telephone directory and that if the reader needs the fax number then they can always call the voice number and ask. If we do decide that it's appropriate to include a fax number, then it should definitely be as a separate field rather than as part of the general "contact number" field, so that we can handle it consistently across all schools.

When we get this all nailed down the documentation (in section 1 above) needs to be updated so that people know what to put in these fields.

Jordan Brown 04:30, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Image sizing

One of the things I noticed is that many logos are square or portrait-format, and those are particularly bad when scaled up to 220px wide, because they become too tall. I just looked at Wikipedia:Extended image syntax and found that you can specify a maximum height too, in the form <width>x<height>px (e.g. 200x100px for 200 wide, 100 tall). Perhaps the default should be 220x165px or so, to ensure that the image ends up fitting in a 4:3 box that's 220px wide. (I still want a "don't scale up" option, but this would help.) Thoughts? Jordan Brown 06:03, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

There may be minor, minor problems with this idea, but I shall explain later. Just to tell you, if you want to remove support for the cleanup category with respect to images, replace the image line with:

{{#if:{{{image|}}}|
<!-- -->{{!}} colspan="2" style="text-align:center; border-bottom: 1px solid DimGray;" {{!}} [[Image:{{{image}}}|{{#if:{{{imagesize|}}}|{{{imagesize}}}|220px}}]]
<br /><small>{{{caption|}}}</small> }}

Gracenotes^T § 22:10, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Multiple images

When you have a photo of the school, a logo, and a picture of the mascot (to take an extreme case), which one should go in the main image field? Is there any standard for where the others should go? Check out Haines City High School, which puts a mascot image in the mascot field without any explicit support from the template. That and Hermann-Böse-Gymnasium, which has a logo in the infobox and a picture of the school in the article, are the articles that prompt me to ask. Thoughts? Jordan Brown 06:03, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Phone numbers

We're including school phone numbers now? Are we sure this is wise? My understanding was that Wikipedia was not a phone directory. Is there consensus for this addition? If so, could someone please point me at the discussion? Thanks. --Elonka 20:24, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Contact information, specifically including phone numbers, has been in since the initial creation of the template. I'm not enough of a Wikipedia theologian to say for sure whether it's appropriate to include contact information (which, notably, should include both phone numbers and URLs), but I'd draw a distinction between lists of nothing but phone numbers and including a few primary points of contact. Phone numbers for every classroom would be excessive, but one phone number for the school seems OK. Jordan Brown 23:22, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm mildly against the phone numbers. Contact information is not encyclopedic in articles, and since infoboxes summarize articles, it shouldn't be in infoboxes. Gracenotes^T § 21:59, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

So why do we include URLs? (One might say "because you can just click on them", but that seems kind of weak and if you have Skype then you can just click on "callto:" links to telephone numbers.) Jordan Brown 14:45, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm not convinced by your analogy. After all, analogies should be used for explaining things, not proving them. URLs are standard in articles, while phone numbers are not. URLs are useful for their value as a source. They add something to the article. Calling a phone number... well, you might get the lunch menu, but nothing that could be considered a reliable, static, and useful source. Gracenotes^T § 05:56, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. I don't think of the link to www.ibm.com at IBM as being a source; I think of it as a contact point or a "for further information" point. Since it's supplied by the organization described, it's not a reliable source. Anyhow, that's not the reason that I (somewhat weakly) support including contact information. The reason is quite simple: if I'm researching some organization, there's a decent chance that I'll want to contact them and so it's useful to have the information handy. Jordan Brown 05:39, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

The difference is that web pages are static; phones aren't. No matter, though... I wonder if anyone else feels the same way, though. Gracenotes^T § 23:23, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry that you do not like the idea of there being a Contact Number. However, having a direct contact information to the source can be helpful. You're right, it isn't necessary, but it is helpful. Think of it as adding links to an article. It is not necessary to add links to articles, but adding it is extremely helpful to the reader. So there is a win-win situation with adding the Contact Information to the template. Thanks! Gooden 05:07, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Spacing

I've adjusted the usage examples to include a space after the equals sign on each row, and to correct the first line in each ( {{Infobox School ). --Geniac 15:51, 30 March 2007 (UTC)