Wikipedia talk:List of infoboxes

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Archive
Archives
  1. February 2004
  2. February 2004 – 2006

Contents

[edit] 2006

[edit] Missing Templates

Hi,
I'm missing a common Template for the Units of measurement.
see also: Unit Template in the German Wikipedia
MovGP0

[edit] User Infobox

I was wondering whether there is a need for a template:Wikipedian or similar. I've created an example at User:Smurrayinchester/Infoboxes#Wikipedian, but don't want to waste time and space creating a useless template. smurrayinchester(User), (Talk)

[edit] Alphabet info in languages infobox (bottom maybe?)

That would be great. Such as French Alphabet/Latin or Gothic Language Alphabet/Gothic, Arabic, etc, etc... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infobox#Languages Ksenon 05:41, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Since not all languages are alphabetic, I would suggest a "Writing System" entry in the infobox that might list WRITING SYSTEM: Alphabetic (Cyrillic) for example
Great idea. The broader and more informative, the better. Ksenon 20:58, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Infobox for Charities

I have an idea for a new Infobox, the idea is to have one for charities and non-profit companies.

pjb007 13:12, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Infobox for Universities

Can this also be used for colleges.

pjb007 16:26, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed split

This page is far too large, it is almost impossible to load it over a V.90 modem line. Omniplex 08:28, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Rant about black on black effect moved to Infobox TLD. Omniplex 04:16, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
Rant about erroneous {{subst:-}} removed, see Template talk:-#Fixed_bugs, I patch old template expansions here manually. Omniplex 16:01, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Fair use

Per Wikipedia fair use policy, fair use images should not be used outside the article namespace. I've converted the fair use images to links (I may have missed some). Feel free to revert if this edit was in error. --Muchness 23:14, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Stadium Infoboxes

I've been having a look at some of the football stadium articles on Wikipedia, and I've noticed that many of the articles don't have stadium infoboxes. So, I thought I'd do something about it. However, it seems there isn't much consistency regarding the use of infoboxes in the articles that already have them. Examples:

Santiago Bernabéu uses one type;

San Siro uses another;

St James' Park has another;

Camp Nou has yet another.

Is it really necessary to have all these different infoboxes? I think it would look much better if they all used the same one, but I'm not really sure which would be the best. Any thoughts on this? --Léman 22:46, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Too big

Please, I need something saying that the infobox on California State Route 1 is too big. The WikiProject guys aren't listening to common sense. --SPUI (talk - don't use sorted stub templates!) 22:28, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

It seems just right for me. --Siva1979Talk to me 15:28, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] colors

made the template {{infobox colors}} to assist. →AzaToth 20:40, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Nice work, but I'm pretty sure that most (if not all) of that particular color scheme has been abandoned by now. —Kirill Lokshin 20:44, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Infobox instructions

Is there a standard form of usage instructions for infoboxes? Also, is there a stardard that says the instructions should be placed on the talk page. The reason I'm asking is because I think that the best place to put instructions would be on the infobox's main page (inside a pair of noinclude tags, of course). This way when a user goes to the infobox page they don't just see a mess of code or a box with a bunch of inclusion tags in it. A novice may not even realize the instuctions are on the talk page until they go there to ask how to use it. - Trevor MacInnis (Talk | Contribs) 23:29, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

If you put <noinclude>{{esoteric}}</noinclude> on the template page (like on {{Infobox Locomotive}}, for example), it tells the reader that the template uses optional parameters and that the usage statement is on the talk page. Slambo (Speak) 11:41, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
Ok, sounds good. I had seen it done both ways so I was wondering. Now the question I have is - are there any infoboxes that arn't esoteric? Perhaps the two categories (Category:Infobox templates and Category:Esoteric templates) could be combined. - Trevor MacInnis (Talk | Contribs) 18:08, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
Definitely not, Trevor: Templates other than Infoboxes can belong in category 'Esoteric', and some infoboxes may be too simple for the latter category. — SomeHuman 22 Mar 2007 04:19 (UTC)
Update: The template Esoteric became renamed Intricate, hence <noinclude>{{intricate}}</noinclude> will do the same (still automatically putting your template into Category:Esoteric templates as before, the name of the category is not changed. The new name goes with an updated template that offers 2 extra advantages:
  • An optional parameter can show an extra inserted line of text (not wrapping automatically, you need to put <br/> in if it would be a long line), e.g.
    <noinclude>{{intricate|Please carefully read the [[{{PAGENAME}}/techdoc|technical documentation]].<br/>Warning: This template is being used for several very different situations, test each kind (check 'What links here').}}</noinclude>
  • Its link to the template sandbox for testing now also checks for the existence of a dedicated template sandbox (simply a subpage of your template with /Test sandbox). Creation of such is not advisory for relatively seldomly modified templates, then the general template sandbox or one of its Xn is far more appropriate, even for highly complicated templates.
Kind regards. — SomeHuman 22 Mar 2007 02:08 (UTC)
Note also: The former template Esoteric, now template Intricate, has nothing to do with telling readers that there are optional parameters, nor that the talk page would give information about those. The template rather warns about a dose of knowledge and experience being required to successfully edit the template, and to always do this in a separate environment and test the modified template there.
For templates that require or can optionally accept parameters, it may be better to create a subpage /doc (not /techdoc) with the useful information and in the template you add at the end:
...          ...<!--template end--><noinclude>

<br/>{{template doc}}
</noinclude>
This ensures that the content of the documentation is shown at the template page (see for instance Template:map caption).
Then at top of the subpage /doc, put:
<noinclude>{{template doc page viewed directly}}</noinclude>
<!-- EDIT TEMPLATE DOCUMENTATION BELOW THIS LINE -->
The latter ensures the reader to realize looking at the documentation page directly, see for instance Template:map caption/doc
This is about the documentation for users of the template. For documentation aimed at developers modifying an otherwise difficult to understand template, though I don't think that a standard name exists, I suggest creating subpage /techdoc and reference it like I mentioned in my comment here above under 'Update' in the sample for 'Intricate'. Kind Regards. — SomeHuman 22 Mar 2007 02:38-03:33 (UTC)

[edit] Search engine appearance

This section was moved from Template_talk:Infobox_animanga by GunnarRene

Search engines tend to rank Wikipedia highly. When I searched for an anime series in a search engine before, the search engine summary would show up like this:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. RahXephon (ラーゼフォン Raazefon?) is a science fiction anime television series about young Ayato Kamina, his ability to control a godlike mecha known as the RahXephon, and his inner journey to

..but now, with an infobox at the top, the summary looks like this:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. RahXephon. ラーゼフォン. ( RahXephon ) No. of episodes. 26. No. of volumes. 3. Novel. Artist. No. of volumes. 5.

...which is much less informative for the user. Does anybody know of a way to fix this? --GunnarRene 17:31, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

That has more to do with how infoboxes are implemented in Wikipedia and that you can't hide part of a page from Google. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by TheFarix (talk • contribs) 18:24, 22 April 2006 (UTC).
Could something be done about this? I'm not suggesting cloaking, which is a Bad Idea(TM), but perhaps by having the table appear before the summary in the html stream, while still appearing in the same place? This is a CSS issue. It is possible, of course, to move the {{RahXephon_infobox}} down to after the summary, but changes the visual appearance of the article. --GunnarRene 20:01, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

I boldly moved the infobox on RahXephon below the first paragraph, but still not below the rest of the summary. It looks less than optimal, though. --GunnarRene 20:25, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

I've looked at the code now. The possible "solutions":

  • Adding some relative positioning in CSS. Demands a set number of pixels between definition and top of article. Not good.
  • Making a table to enclose the the infobox and the article summary. Doesn't work for long infoboxes.
  • Asking the search engine companies to omit the content of 
    <table class="infobox bordered">
    or 
    <table class="infobox">
    from their search summaries. How about it? --GunnarRene 21:24, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

I've sent an email to Yahoo!, quoted here: User:GunnarRene/Search engine abstracts --GunnarRene 22:02, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Yahoo! was not interested. I got a boilerplate response suggesting I take it up with wikipedia. --GunnarRene

But look at this search: http://www.ask.com/web?q=influenza . Bang: Totally relevant summary, with the picture from the infobox while the "nonsense" from the infobox is gone. Nice. And it works with the infobox still at the top. But that doesn't help text based browsers. Perhaps I'll go to Bugzilla with this? --GunnarRene 12:20, 4 May 2006 (UTC)


Let's experiment.. Pick two templates and enclose them in this tag: <noindex></noindex> and <span id="NOINDEX"></span> and see if the yahoo or googlebot picks up the text. --Kunzite 02:06, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
I'll do it on the article page itself first, before migrating into templates or the wiki source code. Choice of article has to be one where Google or Yahoo don't have manually written abstracts (such as for wiki pages that appear in the Yahoo directory).

Noindex is not allowed HTML. Hm.. Feature request? --GunnarRene 10:48, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

<noindex> was a proprietary code written by a some smaller search engine that may have been expanded to the larger ones. Span noindex is said to be a replacement. Don't know how well they're followed by the major search engines. (That's why I said to test.) --Kunzite 11:22, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Yahoo:

Infinite Ryvius - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Infinite Ryvius. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Infinite RYVIUS. 無限のリヴァイアス. (Infinite RYVIUS) Genre. Directed by. Goro Taniguchi. No. of episodes. 26 ... Infinite RYVIUS (無限のリヴァイアス, Mugen no Rivaiasu?) is a 26-episode ...

Google:

Infinite Ryvius - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - [ Translate this page ]
Infinite RYVIUS. 無限のリヴァイアス (Infinite RYVIUS). Genre. TV anime. Directed by, Goro Taniguchi. Studio, Sunrise. Network, TV Tokyo ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Ryvius

Now trying the span of NOINDEX on Infinite Ryvius also. Please note that any changes in the abstract might not come from my change, but a change in the algorithms of the search engine providers or outside changes. Also, Yahoo seems to make the abstract based on what is in the search string, so it might not be affected at all. --GunnarRene 12:14, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm ending this experiment. The search engines create abstracts in their own ways that are different and may or may not include the infobox depending on the search query. Too bad that infoboxes look a bit like nonsense for our blind readers (using screen readers or Braille), but I'm not too sure that those readers actually have a problem with skipping through it.--GunnarRene 03:39, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

In google the result for searching for an article that I experimented with looks like this

RahXephon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Jump to: navigation, search. RahXephon (ラーゼフォン, Rāzefon?) is a popular science fiction anime television series ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RahXephon - 121k - Cached - Similar pages

That would be good. Too bad that only shows up when searching for the actual URL. Otherwise, the parts of the article text found relevant by the algorithm is selected as the abstract. The content of the abstract thus may or may not be human-comprehensible. --GunnarRene 03:43, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Request for Organisations infobox

Can I request an infobox for Society > Organisations > Professional Body (or professional organisation)? There are many of these and many have a lot of information, so it looks a lot cleaner if we can have an infobox. See List of professional organizations and List of British professional bodies. Can anyone help? -- S Masters 16:00, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pictures in infoboxes

Is it just me, or is every picture in every infobox on wikipedia vertically compressed when compared to the original? Has this ever been brought up before, or has it just been overlooked? Jaskaramdeep 20:40, 20 June 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Shortcut

Since this is even remarked as being out of date, shouldn't the WP:IB shortcut go to this one instead? --TheTruthiness 08:18, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Infobox accessibility issue

I'm looking for folks to help with what I fear is a widespread infobox accessbility issue. Please see Wikipedia:WikiProject Usability/Infobox accessibility. -- Rick Block (talk) 02:49, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Infobox font-size

Most infoboxes use the infobox css class. Most infoboxes use a smaller font. So why isn't this smaller font part of the class definition? Why does this have to be specified through a style attribute again and again?

This has the potential to make infoboxes look less uniform (geo infoboxes use 90%, others use 84%) and it makes it more difficult to change the appearance of infoboxes through user css (skinning). If we were to move this over to common.css, all this would be solved. Shinobu 21:40, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Can we ban all frivolous user infoboxes?

I notice there is a meteoric rise in the use of frivolous infoboxes (eg "this user likes cabbage"). I don't see why such infoboxes have any place whatsoever in a serious encyclopedic effort. I know they appear in user namespace rather than main wikipedia namespace but even so, I feel they are one of several factors leading to wikipedia being dragged into a "myspace.com" effort and away from serious scholarly effort. I'm not a killjoy, but all the effort put into finding daft userboxes could really be better spent elsewhere. Is there any possible reason for keeping frivolous user infoboxes? I propose an immediate policy of banning all such new creations and timescale for removal of existing ones. - PocklingtonDan 19:06, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Sounds like a discussion that is better suited to Wikipedia talk:Userboxes. The archives of that page have previous discussions about such proposals. Slambo (Speak) 20:12, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
The "energies could be better used" argument is a bit flawed, in my estimation. I've got 99 userboxes, but at the same time, I've got 12,407 edits (4,857 of those being mainspace). Having userboxes does not equate to not improving the encyclopedia. EVula // talk // ☯ // 21:22, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Sure, but that would be 12,408 if you hadn't stopped to let everyone know you were a "gray reef shark". Now times that by the number of registered wikipedia contributors. Plus, as I say, wikipedia is supposed to be a serious encycolpedia, why would I want to know one of its authors likes jam sandwiches or gray reef sharks? I will duplicate this discussion in the userbox page linked to. Please make no more reponses on this page - PocklingtonDan 21:39, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Because editors who profess an interest in specific fields tend to know more about those fields and have references, images and other materials related to those fields. For example, on my own user page, I have a userbox that says I'm interested in trains ("This user is a railfan"); in my basement I've got about 20 years of magazines related to worldwide rail transport subjects and a large number of books and videos that I reference regularly while creating and working on articles here. Slambo (Speak) 21:54, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] class="infobox" and class="infobox border"

Do I add these on the skin's main.css file or there's a way to add it within MW? If it is manually added (as it seems), what is Wikipedia's setting for class="infobox" and class="infobox border"  ??

Thanks.

--- Laibcoms (talk | Contribs) 08:21, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Suggestion to split proposed infoboxes

The Wikipedia:List of infoboxes/Proposed is totally unweldy at 76kb long and making editing a slow business. Also any history or discussion during the development process is not transfered across to an infobox when it is enacted for real.

Can I suggest that just as WP:AfD does not include each proposal but splits according to days (eg see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2007 February 9), so each infobox proposed is created in a subpage. This is also similar to the WP:RfA process where each nomination is separate page that eventually is moved from active to past proposals simply by removing the link on the main RFA page.

A subpage per infobox proposal would allow edits to an infobox needing just to load the one proposal (rather than waiting for a very long page to load), and both the page and its discussion can at the end of the process be moved to the live thing preserving all of the development history & discussion. This would also ensure that infoboxes that are enacted automatically get removed from the proposed list.David Ruben Talk 02:48, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

As example see how adding sub-page link adds new proposal to the list (change to the List of infoboxes/Proposed) adding just {{Wikipedia:List of infoboxes/Proposed/Infobox Abortion}} to provide the display and links to Wikipedia:List of infoboxes/Proposed/Infobox Abortion, along with fact that we can have a usage explanation page Wikipedia:List of infoboxes/Proposed/Infobox Abortion/doc, and a discussion of its development at Wikipedia talk:List of infoboxes/Proposed/Infobox Abortion. David Ruben Talk 03:37, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Infobox:director?

I'm currently working on the article on Rudolph Cartier, and wanted to add an infobox to it. While I wasn't completely surprised to find we didn't have an Infobox:Television director, I was pretty amazed we don't have a general Infobox:Director, or even an Infobox:Film director which I could adapt for Cartier. Am I missing something, or do we not have a director infobox? I've had a look at a couple of director articles, and those that have infoboxes seem to use adapted Infobox:Actor templates, which can't be the best solution, surely? Is there a proposal to create an Infobox:Director anywhere? Angmering 13:49, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Anyone...? Angmering 18:22, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Infobox request template.

Is there a template for use on talk pages to request the addition of an infobox to an article (i.e. an equivalent to {{reqphoto}}?) --Aarktica 19:24, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

  • I found a template to meet the need: {{infoboxneeded}}. --Aarktica 19:45, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Out-of-date lists

The various lists here are woefully out-of-date, and seem to have been pretty much replaced by categories. Is there still a need for these list pages, or should we delete this and move the relevant conversations to Category talk:Infobox templates? --Elonka 16:58, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Mythological creatures infoboxes

Could we have one? Funkynusayri 14:42, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Professional associations and organizations

There doesn't seem to be any Infobox format for scientific or professional organizations, such as the International Association for Plant Taxonomy, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Could an appropriate box format be generated? --EncycloPetey 14:45, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Infobox franchise

I have created Template:Infobox franchise. Is this infobox okay to stay or not?. Mythdon (talk) 06:17, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Infobox:photographer

Is there an infobox for photographers? --Nadir D Steinmetz 19:55, 25 March 2008 (UTC)