Template talk:Infobox philosopher

Add "resting_place"?

Could resting_place and resting_place_coordinates be added from {{Infobox person}}? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ich (talk • contribs) 12:23, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

 Not done: according to the information box at the top of the documentation page, any parameters from {{Infobox person}} will work in this template, too. So please try to see if the following parameters work:

| resting_place      = 
| resting_place_coordinates = <!-- {{coord|LAT|LONG|type:landmark|display=inline}} -->
| burial_place       = <!-- may be used instead of resting_place and resting_place_coordinates (displays "Burial place" as label) -->
| burial_coordinates = <!-- {{coord|LAT|LONG|type:landmark|display=inline}} -->

Let us know if you are unable to get these to work. P.I. Ellsworth  ed. ^put'r there 14:02, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Frietjes or Jonesey95, more standard biography parameters that should be available here. Needed in Alejandro Korn. Thanks. MB 01:53, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

 Done. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:08, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

Influences/influenced

Several years since the last RfC, these parameters continue to be magnets for unsourced cruft, even with the guideline that each addition should be discussed and sourced in the text. They are too often misused to be useful as reference. I would support their deprecation. czar 03:20, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes please. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:53, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

I came here to basically make this same post, not realizing that I already did a full year ago. I have never seen an infobox in which this field is not abused. I don't think it's possible to maintain this auto-collapsed infobox section in a way that remains reliable and pertinent. If an influence is noteworthy, it will be in prose, as our documentation already recommends. If there is no objection to its deprecation, I intend to do it the next time I remember this talk page section. czar 03:58, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Czar and @Nikkimaria,

I agree entirely, and I am going to bring this up on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Philosophy.

Aside from this just being incredibly obnoxious, here are some relevant passages from the MOS that are routinely ignored:

"When considering any aspect of infobox design, keep in mind the purpose of an infobox: to summarize (and not supplant) key facts that appear in the article (an article should remain complete with its summary infobox ignored, with exceptions noted below). The less information it contains, the more effectively it serves that purpose, allowing readers to identify key facts at a glance." (MOS:INFOBOXPURPOSE)

"Information should not be included in this encyclopedia solely because it is true or useful. A Wikipedia article should not be a complete exposition of all possible details, but a summary of accepted knowledge regarding its subject.[1] Verifiable and sourced statements should be treated with appropriate weight." (WP:NOTEVERYTHING)

"To provide encyclopedic value, data should be put in context with explanations referenced to independent sources. As explained in Encyclopedic content above, merely being true, or even verifiable, does not automatically make something suitable for inclusion in the encyclopedia." (WP:INDISCRIMINATE)

"Lists of miscellaneous information can be useful for developing a new article, as they represent an easy way for novice contributors to add information without having to keep in mind article organization or presentation: they can just add a new fact to the list. As articles grow, however, editors encountering such lists may feel encouraged to add to them indiscriminately, and these lists may then end up becoming trivia magnets which are increasingly disorganized, unwieldy, and difficult to read. A better way to organize an article is to provide a logical grouping and ordering of facts that gives an integrated presentation, providing context and smooth transitions, whether in text, a list, or a table." (MOS:MISCELLANY)

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 21:59, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

@PatrickJWelsh: Some philosophers have a small number of key influences & influenced. For them, it could make sense to to list them in the infobox. However, for many philosophers, the influences & influenced are too numerous and there is no easy way to decide who should be included in the list. In such cases, it's probably better to remove these lists from the infobox.

Another issue is sourcing. WP:V applies to all material in articles, which would include templates as well. Adding one source for each influence/influenced is tedious and impractical. The easiest solution here would be to limit the lists to just repeat sourced content in the article. The passage you cited from MOS:INFOBOXPURPOSE seems to be most relevant here. Phlsph7 (talk) 08:10, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes, the problem, however, is enforcement. I've added hidden html comments directly above the infobox on a few articles to share this information, but I'm not optimistic they will deter those who want to make these kinds of edits. (Evidence of which for this: the Talk discussion linked above.)

Is there some way of managing this—short of entirely removing those fields from the template? I can't think of anything, but a lot of folks here have been around much longer than me.

Also, in case it matters for context, the templates for musicians and authors have no such fields. Those for scientists do, but they show themselves to be subject to the same kinds of misuse as we have in philosophy. According to Einstein's infobox, for instance, he was an influence on Heidegger. (This did at least have a reference, but it did not, of course, support the claim.) I haven't looked around further than this. Even this much, though, does establish that there is some precedent for the exclusion of these fields and that we have the latitude if, in fact, there is broad consensus on the matter.

In favor of their removal, I would additionally point out that, as described in the passage from MOS:MISCELLANY cited above, start-class articles can include and may benefit from have such lists in the body of the article, where they are much more likely to further edited and integrated into the article as it develops. WP:Stand-alone lists are an option for anyone who wants to start something with aspirations of comprehensiveness.

I'm tagging a few others who've been recently active in the project, and I invite others to do the same: @carchacim, @Alduin2000, @MattMauler, @Biogeographist, @Mathglot, @Andrew Lancaster, @Omnipaedista.

Thanks in advance to everyone who shares their thoughts. If others see value in these fields that I do not, I'm perfectly willing to drop the issue.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 14:55, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

• Support removal of influences and influenced parameters. An analogous situation: Although I don't edit music articles, I noticed that last year the associated acts parameter was removed from {{Infobox musical artist}}, and more specific parameters were added instead after discussion. Would something like that change be possible here? Even if nobody can agree on more specific parameters, it still may be be best to remove the influences and influenced parameters, since they have problems analogous to those that led to the removal of associated acts from {{Infobox musical artist}}. Simply removing the parameter is also much easier than replacing it with more specific alternatives. (Thanks for the ping!) Biogeographist (talk) 20:04, 8 September 2023 (UTC)
• Comment. If we totally remove a field from an infobox there could conceivably be articles where things were working fine. Maybe it is better to have a rule that sets a low bar for removal. In other words, if there are objections (which are not jokes), then it should be removed.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:02, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

  Hi @Andrew Lancaster, as best I can determine, what would happen is that those fields would simply disappear from all the infoboxes using this template. If there isn't some way to address this globally when making the change, anyone who clicks through to edit the top of the article would just see some text describing an invalid parameter error. Everything would look fine to the readers, though, and editors would gradually remove the offending fields.

  Obviously we need a authoritative answer on this question before formally requesting this action.

  Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 21:20, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes, if you remove the parameters from the template, they would disappear from the infoboxes of articles where they are used. Any such article would then automatically show up in Category:Pages using infobox philosopher with unknown parameters, which could then facilitate cleanup. — hike395 (talk) 02:30, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

• Support removal There may be ways that these parameters could be useful in theory, but the practical reality is that they are not at all used in these ways. And the benefit of these parameters even when used properly is going to be pretty small - giving more detail and context in the body of the article is always going to be far better. I also agree with Biogeographist on the connection to the Associated acts parameter in Infobox musical artist. (Also, I think Carchacim is meant to be Carchasm?) Shapeyness (talk) 23:54, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Support removal - I've been populating these parameters on many infoboxes that I add or edit, but really mostly because it's there, and when I add the names that are already supported by citations in the body of the article, I find it's rare that it adds anything overly useful to the article that deserves such a prominent place, so I don't think we lose much of anything in removing it. We also perpetually have issues with WP:UNDUE/WP:PROMOTIONAL cruft creeping into the "influenced" section of more famous philosophers, so I support the removal of an otherwise not helpful attractive nuisance. - car chasm (talk) 01:08, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

• Support. I think in philosophy articles this information normally "goes wrong" and even when it doesn't it is of limited value. It can tend to create over-simplified views of philosophers and in philosophy articles oversimplification sort of defeats the whole purpose of having articles which try to explain the reality of philosophy and philosophers.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:28, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

• Support removal In most cases, these fields are not useful and add unnecessary clutter. It is often arbitrary whether a person is included as an influence/influenced without a clear principle on how to decide this. Phlsph7 (talk) 07:40, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

• Support removal This is still my position, for all the reasons I've stated above, just in case that is not obvious, or it is important to use the boldface to affirm this.

Also, what is the best practice about how long to leave this sort of thing open? All votes are votes for support, but I would not want anyone alleging that we made a global change without leaving ample time for comment from other members of WikiProject Philosophy. Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 15:01, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

Given the absence of objections to a proposal that has been on this page for one and a half years, and which was recently shared here and endorsed by all all voting editors, I am placing the request that the influences and influenced fields be deleted from the philosopher template. . Thank you! Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 16:41, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

 Done * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 18:13, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

Hello. I am not a Wikipedia editor, just another Wikipedia user. From time to time I usually enter the biographical infoboxes, among them those of philosophers. At this time I am surprised that the "influenced" and "influences" fields have disappeared. They will have their reasons why they did it, apparently by "unanimous acclamation", and I am not going to enter into a discussion about that.

My complaint in any case is that infoboxes are slowly being eliminated from the encyclopedia and beginning to lose the importance they had. In fact, something I wonder about is when you visit a new article, how do you know what information is hidden? or has it been deleted? So one should bother going to the edition to verify...It's not very logical, or is it?

This is supposed to be a free encyclopedia and a little extra information, even with all the reasons against it, doesn't do any harm. In addition, these fields had the advantage that they could be hidden by default and displayed at the user's request if it bothered the authorized majority. In my opinion Wikipedia is losing a lot of seriousness. That's all. Sergio cd (talk) 21:13, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Sergio cd, thanks for sharing your thoughts. (Also, you should know that as a Wikipedia user you are also just as much of an editor as you want to be!)

If you care to review the reasons for this decision, you will find them all stated above for you or anyone else to review.

In my judgement, insisting that influences be described in the article with supporting citations makes Wikipedia more serious – and simply a better, more reliable resource – than allowing them to be cataloged without context in an infobox. (It only added to the problem that many such entries were either extremely tenuous or outright wrong.)

Also, if you are worried about good information being maliciously removed from pages, please know that every edit to Wikipedia is preserved and can be accessed by anyone through the "View history" link at the top of every page. If you find something wrongfully removed, you can restore it yourself or raise the issue on the associated talk page.

Regards, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 22:28, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

Hello Patrick, thank you very much for your kind response. I insist that I am not arguing at all about the reasons that motivated you to hide or eliminate the information from the "influenced" and "influences" fields in the infobox, with which I largely agree. My note is about how this is greatly affecting and changing the experience that was browsing around Wikipedia, and in my opinion it is not for the better. Beyond everything that has been objected to, reviewed and discussed here, for example, these fields served at least to give ideas, within the navigation itself, and with the advantage of access to hyperlinks. If you want the page or the infoboxes not to be subjected to abuse, a matter in which you are absolutely right and I agree 100%, why not protect the edition? in those particular fields? I know from my own experience that there are several pages and infoboxes that show protected or semi-protected information in cases where it is required, without the need to delete or hide it. Is this new measure or action so necessary then? And just like this, similar actions have been taken over time, in Wikipedia in english or in other languages, unfortunately.

Most Wikipedia users do not want, nor are we looking for, an ideal encyclopedia or a perfect encyclopedia, but rather just a useful encyclopedia.

Best regards. Sergio cd (talk) 23:42, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

Wikilinks to documented influences will (of course!) still be in the articles themselves. This web of interconnected links is one of the best things about Wikipedia.

If you are browsing philosophy articles in Wikipedia to learn about what you did not even know to ask, you might check out Portal:Philosophy or, more expansively, Wikipedia:Contents/Portals.

I have not been involved in this part of Wikipedia, but these portals are designed to highlight the best, or just most recent, of what the site has to offer on specific subjects.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 00:13, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Hey there,

I'm just an user and I always looked for influences in order to get a better understanding on how some ideas and frameworks possibly influenced philosophers. However, I'm not really familiar with how Wiki works. Where can I find the wikilinks which document philosophical influences?

Respectfully,

Caio Cezar 2804:14D:168A:9F13:E0DF:8F4B:DE81:F28E (talk) 00:57, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

Hi there!

A reasonably developed article about a philosopher will include this information in the body of the article—even if the entry is not long enough for it to be set off as its own section.

If it is missing entirely, call attention to this on the Talk page! Very likely someone will step up to supply at least some of any pertinent information that is missing.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 01:23, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

You can also browse a graph of interpersonal relations such as influences in Wikidata or via the Reasonator interface to Wikidata: Here's Martin Heidegger in Reasonator. Biogeographist (talk) 21:17, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Viewing it historically doesn´t work, the fact that it has been removed as parameter means that it is simply unrecognized, try it yourself, pick any philosopher. StrongALPHA (talk) 18:17, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Hi @StrongALPHA, you need to hit "Edit" and browse to that section of the infobox. The information is still there for anyone to reintegrate into the current article, should it merit inclusion.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 18:28, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Hello, everyone.

It is a shame that I only found this discussion now that problems emerged. I will leave out all topics about what information should or shouldn't be on Wikipedia, because this is a long conversation itself.

Rather, I'd like to talk about my current research that is basically comparing if this tab, containing information about influences and influenced people, is supported by the text on the page. I am a M.Sc Computer Science student, thus I am researching influence in websites publicly maintained.

I said that problems emerged because this week I was webscraping this websites and realized that my code failed not because of a error, but rather because the information was removed (not placed somewhere else, but removed). See, even though we are still able to find the previous articles in the history view, it becomes extremely more complicated to crawl through these versions.

Do you pretend on removing this infobox tab in other categories, such as scientists and others? Because I am still researching this, and if all these information were removed, I'd probably have to find another approach.

Is there another way to re-insert these texts, but in another section or "hidden" part, or including a disclaimer about the veracity of the information? 2804:14C:5BD8:5070:F7CC:DCF1:6F7A:8EA5 (talk) 03:44, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

There is no plan or campaign to remove these parameters from other infoboxes, to my knowledge. Different infoboxes have different parameters; for example, {{Infobox musical artist}}, as mentioned above, removed an analogous parameter last year.

Wikipedia is so volatile that web scraping is not a good method for doing research; you should have downloaded the database so that you had a specific snapshot of the encyclopedia. By web scraping you're not getting a precise snapshot of one version of the encyclopedia. Sorry that you had to learn this the hard way, but perhaps your research will be better now that you know a better method. Biogeographist (talk) 17:38, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

The thought occurred to me to check Wikidata to see if similar information is there, and indeed it is: for example, I checked Martin Heidegger (Q48301), which has the properties doctoral advisor (P184), doctoral student (P185), influenced by (P737), student (P802), and student of (P1066). At least for Martin Heidegger (Q48301), most of these properties do not have references. So if you want a ready-made but unreferenced knowledge graph about influences, it looks like Wikidata has what you want. Biogeographist (talk) 18:02, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

• Post-removal support (thank you!) – For a while, the Confucius biography had Goethe, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and other western figures under the "influenced"—simply because that at one point interacted or wrote about Confucius! This kind of misconception appears everywhere when this parameter is used. Influences should be explained in the text. For some philosophers it was especially silly, like Plato and Kant who had "influenced virtually all of subsequent Western philosophy"—just puffery that doesn't really impart any actual information. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Aza24 (talk • contribs)

Hey, I proposed to do the same with Infobox scientist, see here: Template_talk:Infobox_scientist#Influences/influenced. Artem.G (talk) 16:32, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Hide the "Philosophy career" when embed

Kind of self explanatory. One can need the fields contained in "infobox_philosopher" without having a de facto career in the field. Comrade Mmirg (talk) 18:14, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Introducing signature_type parameter

I created |signature_type= parameter for {{infobox person}}, which could be used to set alternative label to |signature=, e.g. Seal, Monogram. Here you can just add a wrapper in source code. -- Great Brightstar (talk) 13:38, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

 Completed. P.I. Ellsworth , ed. ^{put'er there} 13:25, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

I may have broken the Hannah Arendt example

I was doing a project mapping out a web of philosophers and I found an anomaly in Hannah Arendt's page where the infobox was broken and the lists were messed up. I "fixed" it recently and just noticed it was used as an example on this page. I am going to try to make adjustments to make it a "good example" again, so if I mess up, someone who is better at this should step in or a different article should be used as an example. GigaDerp (talk) 15:14, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Edit request 13 September 2023

Where did the influeces/influenced section go?!

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. See the sections above. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:39, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

"Influences" not showing up?

See infobox of Jyotirao Phule. Fields like "Influences" and "Influenced" exist on this article's infobox and they used to show up there but not anymore. Aman Kumar Goel ^(Talk) 06:26, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

See #Influences/influenced — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:55, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Wikidata automatisation ?

Hi, I am trying to contribute on Wikidata around social sciences themes. In case you want to automatize this infobox at some point, it may be interesting to create new properties. I started to list relevant properties here : Wikidata:WikiProject Wikidata for research/Data models/Social science results.

Jeanne Noiraud (talk) 20:43, 7 November 2024 (UTC)