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You perhaps also forget - "Battle of the infobox" - Rival WikiProjects battling to have their infobox first - dreadful compromise is usually.......more infoboxes. See Wetman's elegant solution at Ponte Vecchio and mine at User:Joopercoopers/Origins and architecture of the Taj Mahal (which is a different approach to articles in general really - ie. shunt all the none prose stuff to 'at hand' tabs. Discussion welcome at User:Joopercoopers/Tabbed articles. Regards --Joopercoopers (talk) 15:58, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
Pasted in from Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Composers/Infoboxes_RfC#What_I_loathe_about_infoboxes.
Infoboxes seem to pander to the lowest concentration span. Their premise seems to be that readers can't absorb the key facts from extended text, or that they want isolated factoids hammered into a prefabricated shape. They judder against the lead as a summary of the main text, but are prone to deceive (not by purpose, but in effect). Their inclusion would be derided in any culture that wasn't saturated with 30-second television ads and news broadcasts featuring 5- to 10-second grabs from politicians, PR consultants and disaster witnesses. Infoboxes are at loggerheads with WP's goal of providing reliable, deep information about the world; they intrude between readers and their all-important engagement with the opening of the main text.
Infoboxes should be used only occasionally, with great care. They should not be a formulaic part of articles. Those who are pushing the project to accept this cancer everywhere would be better putting their energy into creating more lists. Tony (talk) 04:19, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
To any editors or readers who come upon this page you may also enjoy a quick peek at this pic [1]. Enjoy MarnetteD | Talk 20:57, 23 May 2010 (UTC)
I've been wondering if there was any sanity around Wikipedia concerning those accursed infoboxes! Sincerely, GeorgeLouis (talk) 00:14, 16 February 2011 (UTC)
Infoboxes are useful as a summary about an article in one area.Northamerica1000 (talk) 15:26, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
Anyone reading this page, might be interested in the debate currently being held here. Giano 10:23, 12 March 2013 (UTC)
As "parameter creep" is one of the issues that raises disinfoboxers' ire, I thought you might want to see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Infoboxes#Enforcing infobox parameters (or not)?
The gist: I cut down the number of parameters used in the infobox for the article I wrote for The End of the Road (a novel) with the intention of making the infobox generally applicable to all the many editions of the book. Three editors at WikiProject:Novels have decided that the infobox must contain ISBN, page count, publisher, and cover image of the first edition, and recommend adding even more (including the Dewey decimal number). Curly Turkey (gobble) 02:58, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
Infoboxes are strictly optional: no policy or guideline either requires or prohibits the inclusion of an infobox on any article.
This is quite misleading. Policies rarely cover such stylistic issues about articles. Guidelines are just that – guidelines – and thus do not strictly require or prohibit anything. In truth, many guidelines and other advice pages encourage the use of infoboxes. Eg:
Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 13:08, 6 December 2014 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Composers#Biographical infoboxes. Let us not suppress one side of the debate, Adrian! Tim riley talk 21:01, 14 December 2014 (UTC)
Can anyone back up this assertion with data? Excluding stubs and disambiguation pages, I find very few box-less pages in article-space. Tarc (talk) 17:30, 6 April 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata has begun to be automatically imported into infobox fields. Should this be opt-in or opt-out? Please take part in the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#RfC: Wikidata in infoboxes, opt-in or opt-out?. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 01:18, 16 May 2016 (UTC)
The title of the essay is misleading, since virtually none of the extant or projected examples and parameters they contain are actually cases of disinformation at all. The only actual cases of disinformation are the doubly-misleading "Years active" parameter in example #1, and the three dates of construction in example #3. Its other problem, the weird "vehicles and pedestrians?" thing, is just a copyediting problem (it's simply unencyclopedic writing). In all three of these cases, the problem is fixed by deleting or correcting the parameter. The essay's suggestion that these parameters could not be easily fixed is fallacious, as is the suggestion that the infobox must go if it contains a parameter that has incorrect or suboptimal information in it. "Your finger is broken, which can't be fixed, so we are digging a grave for you. Please lie here, for your impending euthanasia." The fixes were actually trivial. The dates range for the actor should have run from first sourced role to last, or just been omitted if we thought our information was incomplete; the bridge date should have only been the last of these dates, since previous bridges on the same site are not this bridge; and the bridge type should have been "pedestrian", since it is no longer a vehicle bridge ("pedestrian, formerly vehicle" would also have been permissible). I'm tempted to throw in a "Well, duhhh" here, and roll my eyes. These correction are obvious and non-complicated, of exactly the same sort we encounter every day in editing regular article text.
Of the five supposed "red-flag" criteria, only the last one, "If the infobox contains subjective categories, it is a disinfobox", has anything potentially to do with disinformation, and even that statement is incorrect (a correct statement would be "...may be a disinfobox" [aside from the fact that the label "disinfobox" is itself disinformation!], since in any given the case the categorization may prove to be correct even if the initial reasons for adding it were subjective. The five mostly nonsensical red flags do not actually include the obvious and unquestionable one, the inclusion of incorrect or misleading statements in an attempt to fill parameters just for the sake of filling them, as in the "Years active" example. It's comparable to someone starting an essay about WP:V compliance, then wandering off into a rant about capitalization style and punctuation, and never coming back.
The first example (the male one) does not clearly make the point of the essay at all. It contains a single problem, an inaccurate summary of years active, which should simply be removed like any other bit of inaccurate writing anywhere in an article, and it is not illustrative of an infobox-specific problem. Otherwise, is is actually an example of what typical mobile readers (who are now the majority of our readers) would want to see without being forced to read paragraphs of material on a tiny device. It's also, sans that one problem, a good example of what someone trying to figure out just enough context would want (e.g.: "Why was this person's name dropped in this sentence about a film? Is this a director, an actor, a producer, or what? I'll click through to that bio for a second to find out, so I can clarify the article in which the name was dropped by changing "Ron Richardson' to 'director Ron Richardson', 'actor Ron Richardson' or whatever is needed."). The prose about this box gets hyperbolic with "yet again" statements, but it is the first example on the page.
We do not need an entire multi-paragraph section and fake infobox to illustrate a case of putting incorrect information in a single i-box parameter. That entire scenario can be explained in a single sentence. I would suggest replacing this with an example of either: a) a case where the info provided has nothing at all to do with why the topic is notable, e.g. an attempt to fill every possible infobox field, for someone who is notable only as a murder victim; and/or b) a case where an infobox provides no actual information about the subject of the article but only navigation links, and information about something extraneous to but related to the article, e.g. bio details of a composer, and links to other pages about the composer and their works, being used in an infobox on a list of their operas (an actual problem we have right now).
The second example has nothing to do with disinformation at all; it's just excessive formatting around an image, and a redundant statement of occupation without any additional information. Basically, that infobox violates the simple principle that a list contains multiple items or it's not really a list.
To the extent "disinfoboxes" really exist, they're a minimal problem, and not a categorical one. Almost all cases of "disinfoboxes" are fixed by either 1) converting an infobox like example #2 (the female one) which just contains a photo and a single fact covered in the first lead sentence, into a regular photo; 2) removing extraneous trivia from an infobox which can be salvaged and bared down to actually salient facts; or 3) fixing incorrect or unclear statements in parameters.
Ultimately, this entire essay really devolves to "I don't like infoboxes and will use any flaw in one as an excuse to delete the entire template", just disguised behind paragraph after paragraph of hand-waving about really obvious and instantly fixable issues. The frequency of the problems in question can be addressed by simply improving the documentation of infoboxes. The fact of the matter is that different people prefer to receive, and can more effectively process, information in different ways. A great many people, probably nearly all of us, process some information better in some forms, and other types in other forms, and will process the same article different ways depending on why we're at it and what we're looking for at that particular moment. Wikipedia is not "the encyclopedia that only people who like lots of prose paragraphs can use". It is also not "the encyclopedia where people looking for basic facts can be forced to read for ten minutes to get it, just because some WP:OWNer is inordinately proud of their prose".
— SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 22:30, 9 August 2016 (UTC)
Not every article needs an infobox. Do not add one if it does not provide any value to the article.
Infoboxes provide meta information and semantic content that would otherwise have to be guessed at. For instance, a page about the Atari 2600 is about... what exactly? Do we trust google to figure it out for us? Now that same page with an "infobox game console" states that the Atari 2600 is a game console.
So a page about a person where the infobox replicates the lede does indeed improve the article. Perhaps not within the page itself, but certainly for the other pages and tools that use that information, notably Wikidata. As such, I argue that an infobox provides value to every article, at least until some other mechanism for clear semantic labelling is provided to replace it.
Maury Markowitz (talk) 12:16, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
Hi, according to the proposal of Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of World Wide Web, the current web gradually promotes into semantic web (please read carefully that article). Semantic web means that total web is a huge database that we can request information from it by simple queries. Here you misunderstood the correct importance of Infoboxes in Wikipedia. Infoboxes makes articles machine readable, note that a normal Infobox contains some structured data, or semi-structured data. Some Infobox data is for humans, and some is for machines. I think the correct scenario is this:
Today dear @David Eppstein: reverted my edits here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Factorial&curid=10606&diff=1081085690&oldid=1081083023
I think the writer of this project (i.e., Wikipedia:Disinfoboxes) is not familiar to semantic web concepts and its importance. So please read carefully that idea, and probably apply the scenario I mentioned above. This way all articles (without any exception) should have full Infoboxes, although some of them are completely hidden for humans, and there exists only for machines. Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 07:36, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
Here on en.Wikipedia we are writing an encyclopedia for people who read and write English, not for machines.
You should take this philosophy to Wikidata
the current policy for the article factorial is not appropriate for semantic web goals, then there's something wrong with the semantic web goals, not with the article factorial. XOR'easter (talk) 14:15, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
there's something wrong with the semantic web goals
Is factorial function defined for -1? Yes or no
making articles worse for humans is definitely bad.
it's entirely orthogonal to what this project is trying to accomplish.