Template talk:Oxbridge College Infobox
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[edit] From User_talk:Prisonblues
I noticed your "improved" college infoboxes put in after I had cleaned up the code for the main Cambridge infobox - why on earth did you use the old template? Now they all have clunky html tables - nested inside DIVs with lots of unnecessary style properties. Its all a bit of a mess. ed g2s • talk 00:59, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- I realise it's not as neat, but it looks much better. It's still easily editable, I don't see the problem in having a little 'clunky' html to get a nice looking style -- Prisonblues 09:58, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- Well if you look at the cambridge infobox it looks exactly the same but without the horrible code (which, as I said before, I'd cleaned up). Also I'd much prefer an id="toc" table that skins in with the rest of the wikipedia rather than someone's personally styled box over which there has been no discussion or approval. ed g2s • talk 10:45, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- Apologies, read your comment too quickly and I thought you were saying you preferred the old infoboxes on the college pages because they were in neater wikipipe format. I took the html infobox format from the Oxford Uni page a while back and from there made the college infoboxes. In the time that I was making the college infoboxes, you converted the infobox format from html to wikipipe, making my formatting out of date. I am interested in using user settings via id=toc, but can't seem to find much information on exactly how that works. How much of the formatting of the box does id=toc define, here I got rid of most of the formatting at the start of the table, but wasn't sure how much of the formatting in the middle of the box can be removed as well. How much of the rest of the formatting can be removed? -- Prisonblues 12:33, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- the toc id sets the border to (1px solid #AAAAAA), the background to #F9F9F9, the padding to 5px and the font size to 95%. This is set from monobook.css - which each user can customise by editing their User:username/monobook.css page. See User:Ed g2s/Cambridge infobox for a toc styled version. ed g2s • talk 13:51, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)
There's now a template for this (of the old pre-id style, which looks a little better, IMO) at Template:Oxbridge College Infobox.
James F. (talk) 17:23, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Ok, cool, I'm learning a lot about formatting stuff in Wikipedia. Basically, I've gathered all the information in my [here], now we've got a template for all this, it's pretty obvious that the template should be used, I'll start making infoboxes using the template.
[edit] From User_talk:Jdforrester
Hi. How do you propose we deal with colleges without a motto such as Emmanuel College, Cambridge? This is why I changed it to one parameter rather than two. Lupin 16:51, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)
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- Sorry, I don't understand your reply.
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- I think that the emmanuel page looks horribly ugly as things stand. I also question the point of having "Previous names -" in the table. We need a way of marking parameters in templates as optional - until we have that, I feel it's better to get a template that gives nice results than one that is internally elegant. Lupin 16:59, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)
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- Not passing anything - "[...] motto_Latin = | motto_Lattin = | [...]". I agree, it would be nice to have optional elements, but it would also be nice to be paid to do this... We can remove certain parts (I just took the infobox from Trinity and made it into a template). The problem with doing the crest your way is that it's a bit... ugly :-). Oh well.
- James F. (talk) 17:02, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)
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[edit] College colours
I think there's going to be a problem having a template regarding the way the college colours work. The template has 11 colour fields, which works fine for Emma and Trinity, but won't work for college with 2 or 3 colours or more complicated colours. We would either need several templates (one for each pattern of widths), or a couple of templates for the common 2 and 3 stripe patterns, with the others being done individually, or the ability that Lupin mentioned of being able to have optional elements, but it appears that isn't possible.
In gathering the information, in a lot of cases, it seemed relevant to have a 'founded by' field, but I didn't get round to doing it. What are people's thoughts on adding a 'founded by'. (In most cases the college isn't named after the founder) -- Prisonblues 18:27, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- I agree about the colours. Probably the most practical solution would be a single field in the template, {{{colors}}}, into which you can cram all the hackish html markup you need.
- As for 'founded by', 'previous names' and various other paraphenalia, I think we should have an expandable section into which you can put all of these optional things. Lupin 18:53, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)
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- Hmm. We're apparently not meant to use multiple templates to create single block-level objects (that is, template_part_A, template_part_B, template_part_C, ...), but we could do that, I suppose. It'd make the code less clean.
- Perhaps have the data in a /infobox sub-page, and auto-build the stuff?
- James F. (talk) 18:58, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)
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- This sounds like a Cunning Plan, although I don't know exactly what you mean. Could you point to an example where something like this is done? Lupin 00:10, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)
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- I was thinking along the lines of Template:Todo - that is, on each college's page there is just {{Oxbridge College Infobox}}, which reads the information from [[<college article name>/infobox]] and uses {{Oxbridge College Infobox start}}, then {{Oxbridge College Infobox crest}} and so on until {{Oxbridge College Infobox end}}.
- Workable? James F. (talk) 03:04, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)
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- New Hall is currently black/black/yellow/blue/blue/red/blue/blue/yellow/black/black in your version of the infobox, and given that I just copied yours pretty much completely (thanks! ;-)), I would have thought this suitable for all of the college - are those colours not suitable?
- As for "Founded by", that sounds fine. Perhaps we might want to drop the "former names" bit, though?
- James F. (talk) 18:55, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Although the New Hall colours have 11 colours in order, to get the black and blue stripes to be 3 times the width of the yellow and red stripes you need 15 bands. Also, having an odd number of bands doesn't allow symmetrical patterns. In short, a generic table won't work for all the colleges, as Lupin said we need something like a {{{colors}}}. I'll have a go at it now. -- Prisonblues 22:32, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Alt text on college colours?
Can this be added? I suspect that most people have no idea what the pretty coloured stripes mean. Lupin 01:33, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- Might be a good idea. Not entirely sure how it would be achieved, though.
- James F. (talk) 01:55, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I tried labelling the cells in the table with links on the Queens' page, but it's leaves horrible underlined bits. -- Prisonblues 02:16, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Crest
I know it's a bit late to change it now, but it's unfortunate that this infobox uses the term "crest" when none of the things it's used for are crests. Marnanel 19:36, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- What about be a better term? "Shield"?
- I'm happy to correct them...
- James F. (talk) 22:35, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
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- "Shield" would probably be best. I think "arms" would perhaps do too. (Or you could be really generic and say "symbol" or something.) Marnanel 03:04, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Could the infobox be streamlined?
The infobox is a good idea but in practice it does not display well in my opinion. The main problem is low information density. It takes up quite an important visual chunk of the initial page but does not provide much useful information. Are we sure we need all of the fields? Repeating the name? Motto? Previous names? "Sister college" seems as useful as town twinning to me. This material could be included in the text as required. At the very least the college colours could be displayed less expansively: the horizontal bar stretches the infobox. A photo of a student wearing their college scarf would be much more interesting. (OK, we don't have the photos - but it would be a nice weekend project for someone). On the other hand, I would like to see a financial measure e.g. total revenue - which is public information not generally publicised. Those browsing may be interested to know the resources available for teaching and research. The college that I am looking at to illustrate the above is Balliol College, Oxford. JPF 17:26, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- I think that the information density is easy outweighed by the benefit of a uniform information presentation for easy comparison etc. If we had optional fields, then we could just use the 'full name' when the college actually has a different one. It would also help with the motto and previous names. Sister Colleges are (in my opinion) more interesting than town twinning, but maybe that is just because I find it interesting to see how they are paired off etc. I know that I spent quite some time checking out the sisters of certain colleges. I think that the colours are a very good idea and use far less space than the 'photo of student in scarf' idea, as well as being more iconic. I think that the space issue is due primarily to the size of the picture (at least in the case of Balliol). Finincial resources might be useful, but I don't really support the widespread publication of them in the first place. Toby Ord 13:16, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
[edit] JCR/MCR president
I have added in an entry for the MCR president, to match the one already there for the JCR president. The MCR is the representative body for graduates within the College, whereas the JCR is the representative body for undergraduates.
One possibility for modification is to allow the name of the representative body to be changed. For example in John's College, the MCR is actually called the SBR. This may also be the case for some JCRs. Also, some colleges don't have a JCR, as they do not accept undergraduates, for example Darwin.
SJMurdoch 12:10, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- In my opinion, JCR/MCR/whatever president doesn't belong there at all. It belongs into the text if at all. — Richie 17:19, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
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- I think either both should be present, or both removed and am neutral towards which is chosen. I added MCR president since someone obviously thought JCR president should be present, but if the consensus is to remove both, that is fine by me – SJMurdoch 19:33, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I think both should be removed. It's a completely different type of information to the full college name, the foundation date, or even the Master. This is because it changes so often, and has so much less power/influence or relevance than the other entries. On top of that, not all colleges call it a JCR, for some it's the union of students, e.g. UCS, Union of Clare Students. --Prisonblues 23:06, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- I fully agree. — Richie 08:41, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
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- I also agree - the infobox is bloated with otiose data. JPF 10:51, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Several people have asked for both to be removed and nobody has asked for them to stay, so I have removed them. SJMurdoch 10:47, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Personally, I dislike the boatclub link. It gives the impression the majority of Cambridge students care about rowing and not just the boaties. Dmn / Դմն 13:47, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- I dunno. Water (err, "rowing") is a rather major activity at Camby, certainly, from what I hear of it (admittedly, I know a few rowers, but certainly not exclusively so...)
- James F. (talk) 13:58, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- Rowing is important, but much less important than the JCR and MCR websites and the old members website etc. I don't think that the links to any of them belong in the infobox. Toby Ord 13:00, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
