This page features answers to questions that get raised with regards to the box's construction and usage. Some of this is already addressed by the main documentation, but are reiterated for clarity. Chlod (say hi!) 08:47, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
This box aims to consolidate all infoboxes used by WikiProject Weather. This includes tropical cyclones {{infobox tropical cyclone}}, floods {{infobox flood}}, tornadoes, winter storms, nor'easters, extratropical cyclones, bomb cyclones, and others {{infobox storm}} (which, for the rest of the document, will be called the old infoboxes).
Why are those infoboxes being replaced?
The aforementioned boxes all have styles that are radically different from the infoboxes used throughout the rest of Wikipedia. Contrary to most infoboxes, the weather-related infoboxes have no padding, have densely-packed cells with little to no separation between rows, and are split primarily using horizontal borders. In addition, some infoboxes carry nearly the same template code they did back in the 2000s, and haven't been updated to modern infobox development standards. More information on the justifications for style changes and feature changes are provided below.
Is the name final?
Not yet. {{Infobox weather}} is a potential candidate (with only 33 links, including this one, and 10 transclusions) for the final name. A new name, of course, can also be decided through consensus.
Why rebuild the boxes from the ground up?
The old infoboxes were quite meticulous. For example, in {{Infobox tropical cyclone current}}, setting the box to show a category assigned by the JMA requires you to provide a |JMAtype= or |JMAcategory=. Incorrect names in the provided fields yielded incorrect or conflicting data. Since categories are automatically determined by the new infoboxes, this is no longer an issue for the new boxes.
Perhaps most troubling about the old infoboxes were their difficult maintainability. The old boxes consisted of numerous switches with their own data and text, leading to discrepancies between weather boxes, particularly the small, current, and article versions of tropical cyclone infoboxes. The new infobox uses the centralized 'Storm categories' module, which consolidates categories with their colors, icons, and names for easy access. The goal with maintainability was to make it simpler for non-expert users to modify the templates with relative ease while also making the harder parts easily understandable to template editors.
To demonstrate how frictionless it is to develop infoboxes for other scales, Template:Infobox weather event/scale/doc includes a form to create a new scale sub-box. This may be of interest to template editors or interested weather topic editors.
Some parts of the infobox are better implemented as modules. Why not rewrite the infobox into Lua?
Many editors aren't well-versed in writing in Lua. For the best continuity and maintainability, anything that can be done within wikitext syntax is done in wikitext syntax, and anything else (such as handling categories) is done in a module. This ensures that editors don't need to learn Lua in order to make changes to the templates, make additional subboxes, add functionality, etc.
The new infobox is somewhat significantly different from the old infoboxes. It is not backwards compatible with previous infoboxes (nor is it designed to be) and implementation will require a one-time (and relatively easy!) bot job to convert all the old infoboxes. For editors, the new box includes quality-of-life improvements which make maintaining boxes easier while still allowing a relatively large amount of flexibility. The most significant new features of the box include the following:
Standardized units between all boxes (knots, meters, millibars/hectopascals, United States dollars)
Automatic unit conversion between all boxes (with appropriate unit switching based on article locale)
Modular boxes, which allow mixing and matching agency information
Automatic tropical cyclone categorization based on any variable (be it wind speed, pressure, or other)
Currency conversion powered by {{To USD}} (with optional set year)
Linearly-organized storm histories for reforming/long-lasting cyclones (e.g. Cyclone Matmo–Bulbul)
Support for older scales for historical storms (NPMOC SSHWS scale, PAGASA 2015 scale)
IBTrACS linking within the box
and other minor changes with how data is presented and formatted.
The ultimate goal of the new box is to be easily plug-and-play. Place in the right data, and the box handles most of the heavy lifting. All you have to do next is write the article.
How do standardized units work?
By default, every parameter will now accept units which are most used within the meteorology field. In particular, knots are not used as the primary unit for wind speeds and gusts. These values are automatically converted to reader-friendly units (mph, km/h or km/h, mph, depending on the set |basin=) with no need to add an extra {{convert}} template. For much more complicated cases, it's possible to bypass this automatic conversion system entirely. Passing a value that is not a valid number will make the actual text display instead of the converted version.
The order of converted units vary depending on the basin. For the North Atlantic and the Eastern Pacific basins, miles per hour is shown first. For the rest of the world, kilometers per hour is shown first, as metric units are the more used system for measure distance globally.
How does currency conversion work?
The |currency= parameter sets the currency of the value in |damage= and |losses= and enables United States dollar conversion. Providing an additional |year= enables proper handling of inflation, ensuring that articles remain future-proof.
How do I add references or additional symbols before or after data?
In most cases, value parameters have a respective -suffix and -prefix parameter. For example, |damage= has |damage-prefix= and |damage-suffix= parameters; the former is to add symbols (like ~ or <) prior to the value and the latter is for adding in references.
For {{Infobox weather event/Effects}} specifically, the |refs= parameter can be used if most of the data is provided by the same source. References are placed at the bottom of the sub-box and are placed hand-in-hand with the IBTrACS entry if specified.
Where did the |international= and |enhanced= parameters of the Fujita scale go?
These are now all in the same parameter. Prepending I or E before the scale number will automatically switch the display from standard, international, or enhanced.
How are categories displayed for non-tropical storms?
Category colors can be forcefully displayed using the |category= parameter. The header can be changed with the |type= parameter. See the documentation for more information.
What do I do if a feature in the old infoboxes doesn't work with this infobox?
What if I want to override the category of an infobox?
The category may be overridden with the |category= parameter. If the category provided matches the automatically-computed category, however, a preview warning will be shown. As of now (1150612582; 03:20, 19 April 2023 (UTC)), there is no tracking category for this.
Infobox tropical cyclone, Infobox tropical cyclone current, and Infobox flood were all already dense since their inception (2007, 2006, and 2006, respectively). At the time, the infobox style was not as standardized as it is now, where most infoboxes inherit off of the main {{Infobox}} template. Until now, this is the case: Only {{Infobox storm}} (created in 2007) followed a style very similar to the main infobox until the spacing was removed in 2014. Nowadays, much of Wikipedia's boxes are not dense, with only a rare few including the above remaining as the only dense boxes on the wiki.
These templates were initially conceived at a time when Monobook was still the default skin of Wikipedia. With Vector being the default skin of Wikipedia since 2010, and later on with Vector 2022 being deployed on the English Wikipedia, it's time for templates to conform to the newer, modern, and reader-friendly styles.
This style is not new to the project; {{Infobox tropical cyclone small}} and {{Infobox tropical cyclone season}} have been using the modern style of infoboxes for a long time now. Consistency is key, and keeping the style uniform across all our articles provides a better experience for readers.
The amount of whitespace is still not final; this can still change based on how effective the template is at presenting data.
What's with the bars?
Perhaps the most noticeable change is the transfer of the colored bar that indicates a cyclone's category (and, by proxy, its intensity) from the top of the infobox (above the image) to the center, along with the meteorological data. This change exists for more than one reason:
This allows the category (and the color bar) to be grouped together with the agency issuing relevant meteorological information, which properly contextualizes that data. Because multiple agencies handle cyclones in most of the world, it's important that data provided by different agencies (and particularly data in differing measurement intervals, e.g. JTWC vs JMA/IMD data) is properly paired with the respective storm category.
This allows links to be removed entirely from the color bar, essentially eradicating concerns regarding color contrast issues on the color bars. This was raised in the storm category color change discussions, as the lack of contrast led to accessibility issues for the color-blind.
This allows the construction of infoboxes with differing measurements for differing scales to contextualize intensities. As it stands, storms in the North Indian Ocean or Western Pacific Ocean include intensities for the Saffir–Simpson scale, but whether the Saffir–Simpson scale represents the 10-minute or 1-minute maximum wind speed is left ambiguous, and can confuse readers. Keeping this information next to the proper data helps build that connection even for readers who aren't knowledgeable in cyclone scales and measurements.
This allows gusts and maximum wind speeds to be placed under the same header, and avoids placing labels inside the "value" area of the infobox. This is a just a minor improvement compared to the other changes, but avoids the existing trick used to display gusts for tropical cyclones.
As the bars still remain in the same place they're usually found—the infobox—readers post-switch don't need to go on an easter egg hunt for the intensities. The information is still there in the infobox, just slightly lower and still well within the first frame of a 1920 by 1080 pixel screen running Vector (both 2010 and 2022), no extra scrolling needed.
TL;DR: the ultimate goal is to keep data contextual and remove ambiguity with the way we present measurements.
