User talk:Geogre/Templates

Derived from the article?

"However, all of what is contained in an infobox must be derived from the article."

This is one of those things that is true in the ideal article but very much not the case in practice, isn't it? In fact, I suspect if we get eyeballs on this proposal outside this circle, we will quickly find people who disagree that it should be true at all. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 15:05, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

• I think I said it, though: if it isn't the same information that's in the article, then it is, effectively, a displaced paragraph or a counter article. If it's novel information, then the people who put it up there should go in and make sure it appears in the article as well. This is at the heart of the distinction between an infobox and, basically, a new piece of the article. E.g. in a textbook (which is where, I think, most of the boxers get their inspiration), there will be a little box for the MTV-addled reader, and it will be "the thing you need to study for the test because we know you're not reading and can't extract notes." That box has to represent stuff that's in the textbook, or else it's not an infobox. Geogre 16:19, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

• • quickly find people who disagree that it should be true at all hehe sorry but I'd like to throw in a thought here. When thinking of Infoboxes, I'm minded of the sort of information sometimes found in the Architects Journal building studies. The article proper will give a discourse of the buildings context, construction, precedents and quite a bit of specific pertinent data. However infoboxes are included at the end of the article listing information which is quite useful for reference but otherwise too dry to be unnaturally crow-barred into the prose such as price per square metre, total area of cladding, mechanical and service engineer's addresses etc. I wonder about the nature of an enclyopedia. Policy suggested we should use a summary style in our prose. Maybe the infobox is where supplementary data should be located?--Mcginnly | Natter 21:18, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
    • Also, I thought proponents of infoboxes argue that they are valuable because techy-types can extract all of the information across multiple articles to compile erm......lists I suppose. Is this mentioned in the page?--Mcginnly | Natter 21:28, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

I did mention the "compare across articles of a type," but if a box has information that isn't in the main article, then I maintain that someone is doing something wrong. The box becomes a separate article and can't be added as "no harm, no foul" because it's then an editorial change. In the past, the boxers have said that the boxes are just helpful, that they're not changing anything, that no one should complain, because they're harmless. Well, if they're including information that isn't researched, isn't cited, isn't in the article, then either the article needs help or the box is out of line. Anyway, people will disagree with anything said about boxes, to some degree. My goal is a process rather than a ruling, to try to come up with some general guidelines for how we approach gluing things onto existing articles. Boxes and tags differ from other edits because they inevitably come after an article is more or less complete. Geogre 02:22, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

That's not really true either. You can find plenty of stubs with infoboxes. (Especially in the music area, but really everywhere). Some of the time the infoboxes were added by the original author; sometimes not. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 02:37, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

As I say, that's wrong. That's the equivalent of ornaments without a Christmas tree. If someone is putting in a box without putting the information into the article, then I'd AfD it. Seriously: we are not constructing trading cards, here. Geogre 04:23, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't know what to say. The realities of the situation on the ground are there. As an example, I invite you to look at any five or ten articles in Category:2000s pop album stubs. You'd have literally thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of AfDs to enter. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 05:11, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

A particularly good example of a bad infobox is the one found in some runestone pages such as Burestenen. It contains some repeated info that really doesn't need repeating in such a short article, some stuff that isn't in the actual article text (and which is now, for no particular reason, pushed down below the edge of the screen, at least on my monitor) and it forces the image to be much smaller than would be desirable just to fit in the box. (I guess it would be easier to deboxify runestones than pop albums, though...) up+l+and 11:26, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

• Alright, well, the poptarts should have their articles AfD'd, if they can't manage to write as much as is in the box, and the box authors need to be shamed: if you had to look up stuff to make your box, get off your duff and add the information. The runestone box has a good bit of information that's kind of ... irrelevant. I suppose it's useful, if you're going on the Grand Tour of Runes, but there are a lot of irrelevancies in it. Anyway, we're getting hung up on the "derived from the article" phrase. I thought the procedure section is what folks would be upset about. The section about infoboxes is, I think, a particular verity. Some lone scholar is informed that a Project is moving in and taking over, and there's nothing he can say about it. The boys has decided to put up a box, and nobody get any ideas of being a wise guy. Geogre 11:38, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

• • I know we're hung up in the non-important part of it. But I think not all infoboxes are the same: they run a spectrum from useful to worthless. The proposal may need to make note of that. This issue of whether they can have info not in the article is a part of that, I think. The more I ponder it (and remember the varieties of infoboxes I've seen) the more I think that the useful ones do provide a place for niggly data that shouldn't be shoehorned into prose. The best example may be the taxobox, for living species. Look at one of my articles, gumboot chiton. Putting that full taxonomy into prose wouldn't be a good thing. Now, the biography infobox is another beast altogether. It's useless decoration that (to paraphrase Giano) makes the lead picture look like a bad Italian gravestone. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 16:45, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

• When the rubber meets the road, though -- in the procedures section -- the useful boxes will be totally unharmed by this guideline, as no one in his right mind would object to a taxobox for species. When there are disputes, the matter can get really hot, in that special Wiki way. Have you seen people fighting over which genus a species of bug belongs to? They get really horked off. The point I'm making, though, is that the boxes that are useful will meet with acclaim and not protest, and I want to, to paraphrase Raid bug spray, kill -bots dead when it comes to boxes. The presumption that the private project has precedence over the perplexed prole is pernicious. Geogre 16:49, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Way too reasonable...

to ever be adopted. But a good read nonetheless. As a slapper of project boxes on talk pages and a rater of articles as to importance and quality, I now find myself with something to think about. I hate that. Well said, damn you. ++Lar: t/c 12:03, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

That's a good thing to hear -- the reasonableness charge, I mean. Oh, nothing I ever propose gets adopted when it's by me. It gets rejected, remembered, rewritten, resubmitted, rejected, remembered, rewritten, and then adopted. I have no expectations. I don't really want to stop tags and boxes. I just want to stop the wars and shocks they cause. ("My" Wise Blood got a "poorly written" tag because someone couldn't understand the sentences. Thus, the article had to wear that yellow banner because of some one person's reading skills.) Geogre 12:06, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Good essay

I like what you've written here. I've too have been been saying for a while that nearly all the stuff in an infobox should be derived from the main article. The exception I've come across is boring facts and figures, such as the orbital characteristics of planets (eg. Earth - one of the biggest infoboxes I've ever seen - I have to hit "page down" four times before it disappear off screen) and the physical characteristics of chemical elements (eg. Hydrogen). But apart from 'boring stuff', I agree: the primary infobox should summarise stuff from the article and, if necessary, include technical data. Stuff other infoboxes down at the bottom of the article is my philosophy. I have a similar bugbear about WP:LEAD - the lead section of an article, which should function as a summary of the article, but often doesn't. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen people add stuff to the lead section, but fail to incorporate it into the main article (or vice-versa).

BTW, you don't touch on the other thing that annoys me sometimes. The hatnotes (usually disambiguation ones) that appear at the top of articles, usually in italics. See Wikipedia:Hatnote. The perennial debate is over how to phrase them, as they are often the first thing a reader sees. I remember browsing through some deeply learned articles on history, and being horrendously disturbed by clicking on one article and seeing a hatnote that implied that the article I might have actually wanted was some reality TV programme of the same name. Bleh!

Anyway, the idea of not imposing a straitjacket, and treating each case differently, is good. If a particular WikiProject wants uniform style across its articles, well then, it can publish a WikiBook in that style! Within the encyclopedia proper, if an article is claimed by more than a single WikiProject, then consensus on the eventual "encyclopedia style" is absolutely needed, as you said, rather than imposing consistency. Carcharoth 02:39, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

Templates

What do you think about adding a section on article templates? I find that many of them are poorly designed and encourage overly rigid article design. See discussion here, for example. Awadewit ^Talk 18:26, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Essentially, the designer of the article template is deciding, or claiming to decide, what is essential and what must be said about all possible items in a large field. For that reason alone, they're anathema. The philosophy of Wikipedia is that being open to every single possible author means that errors will be caught and esoterica will be added, and there have been thousands of cases where it has worked just like that. However, when an iron bridle is inserted, that, by itself, whether born out of wisdom or foolishness, tells all possible writers what they must say, what they must not say, and even where and when. It is, in other words, wrongly thought even if the template is designed beautifully. This idea is behind some of my general antipathy to structure boxes of all sorts: they preclude and silence our authors and, equally perniciously, they present the illusion that an article is complete. Both chill input. Geogre 21:03, 4 May 2007 (UTC)