Template talk:Infobox Cyclist

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cycling Portal
This non-article page is within the scope of WikiProject Cycling. WikiProject Cycling is an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to cycling on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and contribute to the discussion.
NA This page is not an article and does not require a rating.

Contents

[edit] Ranks and placings

There are four entries for common rankings, namely ProTour (protourrank), Europe Tour (europetourrank), World Ranking (worldrank) and World Cup Rank (worldcuprank). I'm thinking these are just too difficult and too time consuming to maintain to be of any use. So, I'm going to remove them. Mk3severo 22:59, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Updated date

Why would there need to be an updated date in the infobox? With the number of conscientious Wikipedia users, this information is going to remain pretty well up to date. And I haven't seen it in other infoboxes. I would suggest removing it. Civil Engineer III 13:08, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

I think if there were a number of conscientious Wikipedians then there may be a case for this, however, as the number of people that contribute to cycling biography articles is fairly limited, infoboxes can go without updates for a while, and indeed many biographical articles don't even have infoboxes yet. The idea was taken from other sports/people infoboxes - the direct inspiration at the time was Template:Infobox Tennis player. A quick check also reveals Template:Infobox Football biography, Template:Infobox afl player, Template:Infobox Alpine ski racer, Template:Infobox athlete biography, Template:Infobox Cricketer, Template:Infobox Cricketer (Career), Template:Infobox nbl player, Template:Infobox rugby league biography and Template:Volleyball player infobox all also have some kind updated or stats-updated fields. Personally I don't see the harm in notifying other editors as well as readers of when someone last edited the infobox. Mk3severo 13:48, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
  • Incase you didn't see my response to your question where you posted it, I will supply the response here as well as there:
Hello Severo and thanks for the compliments. Warwick Stevenson is not the only BMX racer I am writing up as you can tell from the BMX racing page in the "Legendary BMX racers" section. I was a BMX racer from 1982 to 1989 (officially retired in 1992) and I have a great many of the BMX magazines of the 1980's, a lot of the 1970's (which explains some of the gaps in the data from that era) and a few of the 1990-2000's (like I said I retired in 1989 so I only have a few BMX mags post 1992 (which I have even larger gaps in the data), but I think ebay can rectify that. :-) As to the info boxes I find them quite adequate for BMX. Any other details I can provide in the body of the article. The Info box is only for basic knowledge anyway. No need for the racer's exact hometown to be listed in the box for instance, just the nationality. If I think of anything I will let you know, but so far it is okay as it is. Hunter2005 10:38, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Microformats

At WP:UF, they are making an effort to put microformats in infoboxes so that software can easily (i.e. automatically) extract information, which utilises hCard. Wikipedia:WikiProject Microformats/hcard details much of the work so far. We would need to copy some of the changes (they're only minor) to the template here.

I envisage change of usage to use these standards to be quite small. The only things we would need to look at is handling birth and death dates of the deceased. The addition of a gender field may also be needed - although we would not need to display this field.

SeveroTC 08:59, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Height and weight templates

{{Height}} and {{Weight}} are available for standard formatting of height and weight. Would their use be preferred over manual entries? I think it would help standardise many boxes and provide a wider coverage as it uses both imperial and metric units, whilst maintaining MOS requirements by putting the main one for the subject first. SeveroTC 23:18, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

I've started using them, but there still seems to be a fair amount of debate whether they are entirely useful or not. Many infoboxes do not yet have a standard... SeveroTC 16:28, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Amateur/professional teams

I'm thinking Amateur teams is a bit of a useless field. Information here is a)scarce and b)doesn't matter. I can't see many situations where this would be interesting enough information to warrant being in the infobox. Can anyone think of any uses where it is useful?

Also, if the section were to be removed, should Professional teams be renamed, perhaps to Senior teams? SeveroTC 16:27, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

I restored the amateur sections since I am using it for the BMX discipline of cycling. I do think it is necessary to have an amateur section to give a fuller history of the racer's background. If that option is removed I will be prevented from doing so. If a editor think such information is extraneous then he has the option of just leaving the information out and it would not affect the look of the box one bit, so removing the amateur section is unnecessary for those who feel that that info is unnecessary. Just leave the field blank if you do. As for renaming the professional box again why? They are professionals and they are on professional teams. What does the term "Senior Teams" tell you? Nothing. If it is just a euphemism for "professional" then why bother? Hunter2005 23:32, 28 May 2007 (UTC) & Hunter2005 04:03, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Sounds fair enough, and the whole point of {{Cyclist infobox}} is to cover all disciplines the UCI cover. I may change the guidance notes to actually ask if the amateur teams are notable enough to the article to be given prime placing in the infobox. Regards, SeveroTC 13:42, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikilinks within the infobox

I would like to question the logic behind the statement "Linking of other entries is to be discouraged as most of these links will present themselves in the article's introduction; linking them in the infobox adds clutter and inhibits the speedy retrieval of facts."
In particular, I am advocating the wikilinking of a rider's previous teams and major wins. While his current team and most-recent or most-major win are likely to be mentioned in the article's introduction, former teams and less-recent wins would only occur farther down. The case can be made that it does add clutter; however, this would apply to all infoboxes for athletes, and more broadly to all infoboxes, and no such precedent exists - compare Barry Bonds, Michael Schumacher, Venus Williams, CNN, USS Alaska (SSBN-732). Not everyone who views a cyclist's page will automatically know what Dauphiné Libéré is, but they might be curious, and it would be just fantastically convenient for it to be wikilinked in the infobox.
I am also mystified by the clause "inhibits the speedy retrieval of facts" because 1) no it doesn't, and 2) how could wikilinking inhibit anything except maybe the selectability of wikilinked text. Opinions? eae 22:02, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Bit lat of a reply, sorry about that must have missed your comment. I basically copied the guidelines from {{Infobox Football biography}}, although it's not really enforced in that infobox. I would maintain that the links should almost always be duplicates of what is in the lead: we should be working to ensure that too much detail is not put in the infobox, but it is an instantaneous guide of the cyclist, nationality, era, what they rode on and how good they were. I'm not entirely sure what is meant by "inhibits the speedy retrieval of facts" either, I wrote all the code for the infobox and copied the guidelines almost as an afterthought. I'll remove this idea, but it doesn't detract from the argument that links should be in the intro, and we don't want to overlink. Regards, SeveroTC 23:28, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Flags

Current fashion is not to have flags in infoboxes. Here, we have a nationality field which typically used a flag, which is being replaced by some editors to just say the country name. This brings up the question as to whether its better to have a nationality field or a place of birth field, or both (for when nationality is not the same as place of birth). Thoughts? SeveroTC 23:21, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

If we use nationality it will lead to controversy regarding what nationality means(flemish/belgian/walloon, catalan/spanish, etc). 'Country' seems more appropriate. Looking at other sport template the best option seems to be the infobox displaying 'Place of Birth'/'Place of Death'. Something like this:
| country =
| dateofbirth =
| cityofbirth =
| countryofbirth =
| dateofdeath =
| cityofdeath =
| countryofdeath =
Regards--Drunt (talk) 10:19, 15 January 2008 (UTC)