Template talk:Infobox university/Archive 3

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Location

It would be nice if we could put the coordinate Bcartolo 16:57, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Format/syntax

Perhaps the formatting of this infobox needs to be tweaked so that the Vice-Chancellor's entry must come directly after the Chancellor's entry. At the moment it is coming after the Principal's entry if that is included, see Sri Sathya Sai University for example. Ekantik ^talk 02:39, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

On the basis that I cannot foresee it breaking any other uses of this box, I have moved VC one place up, above Principal, thus fixing your particular problem. I'm interested: are there many universities where there's a VC and a Principal? And what does the Principal do? (To others: if this has caused problems elsewhere, feel free to revert me!) — mholland 03:55, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks very much! As to your question, no idea really. According to the source page, it looks like the VC oversees several campuses of the University whereas the Principal is in charge of a particular campus. The article in question appears to be focused on the Puttaparthi campus I guess. Regards, Ekantik ^talk 04:49, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Template not working

It seems that the template isn't working right, it's putting a lot of spaces between the top of the page and the text. see University of Tennessee and George Washington University for example --AW 17:31, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

An experimental edit by a new user appears to have inserted the extra spacing. I have reverted. — mholland 17:35, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Documentation update

I have revised the documentation for this template, to include notes on parameters which have been introduced but not documented. A number of things suggest themselves to me:

• I don't know what the vision, calendar and alumni fields are for (or even if they are in use). Can anyone supply documentation notes for these fields?
• I have marked the fields image, location and coor as deprecated. Could someone with the relevant searching skillz find out if these are in use, so they can be zapped? I am reluctant to make coor a proper implementation of {{coor}} etc., if only because this template is already a big beast (but see User:Bcartolo's suggestion above). I suspect there are quite a few transclusions using image, despite the sweep at New Years' by the bot Catapult.

The notes could do with being a bit clearer. Anyone want to make improvements? — mholland 18:17, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Alumni was introduced to try to indicate how many living alumni a university has. It has been used for some Irish universities (where accurate records are kept as alumni elect members of the Senate) though for universities in other countries it's not clear what it proves beyond how good a job the alumni relations office is doing in keeping the contact list up to date. Timrollpickering 19:47, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

I'd like to see the alumni field added back. As an optional field it wouldn't get in the way but adds a lot to the infobox. Any good alumni association is going to keep records on this (not just Irish ones). Good estimates are also available for a large percentage of U.S. colleges and universities, from the Collegiate Licensing Association [1]--Rtphokie (talk) 18:10, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

V.D.E

Can somebody make the V.D.E links on the template higher because it blocks the text in universities with longer names

its rather dumb looking when you see V.D.E. on top of text —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 193.1.229.15 (talk • contribs) 16:54, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

I've removed this bit from the template, as it is absolutely useless to the article the template is transcluded into. The "v-d-e" line is really only useful in footer templates, not in infoboxes. -- Huntster ^{T • @ • C} 22:49, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Imported from Color boxes

I've noticed a lot of pages use hardcoding to create small color boxes like so:      .. or what have you. Anyway, I created a template for use here.. {{color box|navy}} for HTML color names and {{color box|#36789B}} for hex triplets. -- drumguy8800 C T 20:41, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks; that was a pain in the ass, putting together all that code every time one wanted to do a color box. This is much more elegant. I just tested the template on my home campus, and I anticipate going on a binge through the rest of the UCs and CSUs later, using your template. I propose using a standard color line that has the official colors written out using initial capitals on significant words, followed by this new template without spacing between the individual template instances (to avoid colors ending up on different lines).

In general reference to school colors, Wikipedians should note that what their schools usually say are their "official colors" are often no more than approximations ("Yale Blue" and "California Gold" at Cal Berkeley, for instance). The actual, official colors can usually be found through schools' PR, press-relations, or marketing departments in what are usually called "identity standards" documents. They will not always be defined using hex, but will almost always have precise, numerical definitions in Pantone (also called PMS for "Pantone Matching System"). There are a lot of sites online with PMS-to-hex charts (this is the first one that popped up in Google), so no one should have too much trouble finding the right hex codes to plug into the new template.

Again, thanks for your creation. --Dynaflow 20:32, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I noticed that {{Infobox college athletics}} used on many College/University athletic articles already has the hex in the info box. Could those values be added to {{Infobox University}}? --Jerm 20:55, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

There is a colors line in the infobox already, if that's what you mean; it's just been removed from a lot of the transcluded templates in use. It's simple to restore, though. The line doesn't have a straight input for hex, but it might be good to keep it that way for schools with non-standard color schemes (one or three or four colors and other assorted formatting weirdnesses).

One more thing about the school colors: Almost all long-established schools, and even most newer ones, will be following the heraldic rule of tincture. For example, most of the shades of blue used by schools are actually variations on a theme of the heraldic azure. Similarly, the "gold" used in a lot of schools' official colors is actually the heraldic Or. I have been linking the names of official colors (except specific shades that have their own articles, like Stanford's cardinal) with the appropriate heraldic-color articles. This article will help you figure out which "colour" to link the colors to. Here is an example of the color line I put together for the University of California, Santa Cruz:

|colors =[[Azure (heraldry)|UCSC Blue]] & [[Or (heraldry)|UCSC Gold]] {{color box|#36789B}}{{color box|#FFDF82}}

--Dynaflow 21:36, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

The correct place to propose this would be Template talk:Infobox University. I don't expect it would receive much opposition, but I would oppose making any particular way of filling in the colors/colours field mandatory: the infobox is crafted for maximum flexibility, and it's very beneficial that way. This seems like a good idea, though. Good work! — mholland (talk) 02:13, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

I'll copy-and-paste this thread there. I also dislike the thought of making things mandatory, but I'd like there to be a common standard to use as a starting point for new infoboxes and revampings.--Dynaflow 06:12, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Student Affairs

I'm looking for people that are interested in working on Student Affairs related articles on Wikipedia. There is a very low amount of information on Wikipedia about this topic I started a WikiProject related to this. Please visit the previous link and add your name if you are interested! Thanks -- Noetic Sage 04:50, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

I would like to reinstate the coordinates field, using {{coord}} (which emits a Geo microformat) with "display=inline,title". See {{Infobox GB school}} for an example. Any issues? Andy Mabbett 22:15, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't have any personal preference. Do you intend to adjust existing articles to move existing coor(d) implementations into the infobox?

You may also be aware that User:Picaroon9288 recently removed the telephone param, to which you added a microformat class; again, I have no preference either way, but the parameter is currently sitting invisibly inside transclusions of this template, because nobody has yet removed it from articles. — mholland (talk) 13:32, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

I'd plan to move to {{coord}}, inside the infobox, as and when I visited pages, but also to invite other editors to do so. I'm ambivalent about whether telephone numbers should be shown, but, if they are added again in eth future, I wanted the hCard mark-up to be there, ready and waiting. cheers, Andy Mabbett 14:02, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. Remember to update the documentation if you go ahead. Thanks. — mholland (talk) 15:58, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Done, Thank you. Andy Mabbett 18:14, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Professional students

The professional students item doesn't fit on one line in the template box. How can we change this so it does? -- Noetic Sage 16:20, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Title of Commissioner

Can someone please add the title of "Commissioner" to the "Name of university officer" section? Someone keeps reverting this infobox at the LDS church education system (BYU, etc.) article because the head of that system is technically called the "Commissioner". Having this option in the infobox template would solve the problem. Thanks! --TrustTruth 17:12, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

For non-standard titles, you can use head_label and head, where the former is the title and the latter is the name of the office-holder. — mholland (talk) 19:59, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. --TrustTruth 21:13, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Italicisation of {{{nativename}}}

I'd like to suggest that this be removed --- it's only really useful for names in the Latin alphabet. Italicisation is in general not preferred for Cyrillic alphabet, for example; worse, it makes Chinese and Japanese positively unreadable, and does strange things with Arabic rendering. Comments? cab 07:50, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

defunct universities

Quite a few articles in Category:Defunct universities and colleges and its subcategories have no infobox. It seems like {{Infobox University}} ought to be expanded to standardize the fields for former universities.

The most obvious field needed is for the year of closure, though in one case, someone simply turned the "established" into a hyphenated range. 67.101.6.75 20:30, 15 June 2007 (UTC).

Sounds sensible - I don't see any problem with adding a 'closed' parameter (optional, of course). Any objections? TSP 10:16, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

OK, added. The way I've done it is a bit esoteric even by this template's standards - if there is a 'closed' date, then the template has an 'Active' line with both dates; if not, just an 'Established' line as before. Tell me if you think this is OK. I tried just adding a 'Closed' line, but this gave two very short lines each with one date one, which looked to me much worse than the previous hack of just having both dates in the 'Established' parameter. TSP 18:30, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

University colors

Is their a standard way to display the colors of a university? I've seen different ways display the colors and now wonder if their a standard way to display them. I've seen some schools who highlight the name of the color with that color and recently, at the Mercyhurst College page, seen colored boxes below the name of the color. Any help would be appreciated. --​​​​Dtbohrer​​​​^{talk•contribs} 16:27, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

A few of us were discussing this here a couple months ago. Look up. =) --Dynaflow babble 18:42, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

I saw that, that's what intrigued me even more. Are the color boxes now the standard? I just kinda what to make sure. There's nothing in instructions for using the template, so I didn't know if it has been implemented or if its still being discussed. --​​​​Dtbohrer​​​​^{talk•contribs} 14:21, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

I don't think you can really define a standard usage except for what happens to pass for common practice. I personally think the above suggestions or a variation on them are the way to go, and some others seem to agree with me, at least to an extent, but you're welcome to try anything you think might work better for the particular installation you're doing. Be WP:BOLD. --Dynaflow babble 15:39, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

Public transit

Is there any real reason why public transit is the last field? Shouldn't the logo be the last thing in the infobox? It would look much better that way in my opinion. It looks rather silly to have almost all of the fields, then a logo, and then one more field tacked on to the end. --MatthewUND^(talk) 09:18, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

Seems the public transit field has been removed entirely. I'll ask the editor who removed it about its removal. Aepoutre (talk) 00:48, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Yes, look below at the #Extraordinarily bloated section (two below this one); this wasn't done unilaterally. The issue with extraneous fields had been raised more than once. — Huntster (t • @ • c) 13:23, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Nobel laureates?

Can someone please explain to me the merit of including "Nobel laureates" in this info box? It seems to be quite needless and serves only to further clutter and extend this info box rather than providing any essential information. Not to mention the inherent problem of determining which persons to include in this when there are many... --ElKevbo 03:16, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Extraordinarily bloated

Okay, this template has gone beyond absurd in the amount of fields available. What happened to "NOT a list of indiscriminate information; NOT a directory, etc. At what point does it end? I'm thinking that a major purge needs to be performed after reviewing what is actually useful and what isn't. -- Huntster ^{T • @ • C} 19:23, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

I am in complete agreement. Any ideas on where to begin? --ElKevbo 20:01, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

To be honest, I'm not overly concerned, because all but two of the params are optional. However, I do fail to see how the recent additions are of great added value. Staff-ratio strikes me as almost inevitably varying wildly between an institution's departments. And the only user who strongly supported directory information like telephone numbers (here and across the wiki), has recently been given a lengthy holiday from editing. I've started by reverting today's additions on the basis that they were added unilaterally, remain unimplemented and could do with a bit more discussion.

I think picking off rogue parameters one by one would be more sensible than purging the template wholesale: it would give editors a chance to dispute individual removals, whereas a mass disappearance of fields would not be conducive to consensus-building. On my personal hit-list would be calendar (Semesters or terms? Does it matter?), publictransit (cruft), alumni (was designed for a very specific use and isn't applicable for most colleges) and nobel_laureates (very few universities can make use of the field). — mholland (talk) 20:31, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

What's the point of "Campus 2" and "Campus 3"? Generally the "Campus" field is used for "urban", "rural" or even "distance learning". Timrollpickering 21:17, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

The user who added them (and didn't document them) implemented them at University of Medicine-1, Yangon and I suspect that is the only article which uses the fields. — mholland (talk) 22:15, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

(Deindent) Just for the sake of arguement, here's a list of fields that could potentially be removed:

• Tagline - Unlike "Motto", don't taglines tend to change rapidly, almost seasonally?
• Vision - Another potentially rapid-changing field that seems hard to justify.
• Calendar - Fairly irrelevant.
• Debt - Is this really useful, other than to warn potential students away?
• Divinity and Profess - Perhaps I'm just not seeing the value, but the figures here are likely already contained in the Undergrad, Postgrad, and Doctoral figures. Why replicate non-unique data?
• Alumni - Relatively unuseful data...current enrollment seems more valid.
• Address and Telephone - Please, just visit the website for contact details.
• Campus_2 and Campus_3 - Potentially misused terms, considering that "Campus" describes setting, not location.
• Fightsong - "Mascot" is something highly visible at football games, etc. "Fight song"? Not so much.

*Affiliations - I'm not sure why this should be discussed outside the body.

• Nobel_laureates - Basically only serves as a promotional item for the school. Let's avoid this.
• Publictransit - Completely extraneous information. Yes, cruft.
• Residents - easily fluctuating, not easily defined, even harder to find firm numbers for.

Thoughts? -- Huntster ^{T • @ • C} 22:25, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

I think that's an excellent start and I would support removing all of those parameters. --ElKevbo 23:45, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Why doesn't the telephone number show up in the actual article? ALTON .ıl 10:40, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

The telephone and staff-ratio field additions were reverted. Ratio is simply excessive, and telephone was a field that had previously been removed. -- Huntster ^{T • @ • C} 10:44, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

"Affiliations" is a useful field for things like the 1994 Group. So I'd say keep that one but cut the rest. Another that's not really workable is "Residents" linking to "Dormitory", and seems to be for nothing more than the number of students in one type of accomodation that isn't terribly well defined. It was added by a user who insisted that the "campus population" could be easily and clearly listed purely by the number of students renting from the university rather than private landlords and the like, and also didn't seem to grasp the problems of multiple campuses, off site halls, immediately adjoining "studentvilles", privatisation of halls and so forth. Timrollpickering 11:49, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

"Affiliations" is way too broad. Many American institutions have scores of affiliations. I don't even see how the term can be defined in a narrow enough manner to make it useful in the infobox. I advocate for its removal. --ElKevbo 16:37, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

In British universities this primarily seems to be used for things like the Russell Group and the Association of Commonwealth Universities - major groups of universities of which the institution is a part. As such it seems useful, although it is pretty long on some articles. What sort of affiliations do American universities have? TSP 10:27, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Faculty

And and a further pair that's never really been resolved are "Faculty" and "staff". The former term isn't used for any subdivision of staff in many countries - heck the field has even had the number of faculties (academic divisions) in some universities - and isn't allowing for meaningful comparison international or international comprehension. The latter is linking to Employment#Employee and could conceivably encompass non-academic staff - administrators, librarians, catering, cleaners, gardeners etc... A single field is needed that is clearly understood and comparable - how about "Academic staff"? Timrollpickering 12:05, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure where the problem is with these two. The faculty link clearly defines it in terms of North American usage (academia-related employees), whereas staff is the more generic term which can either be used without "faculty" to define all university employees, or with "faculty" to define non-academia support staff (clerks, custodians, food prep, etc etc). My own university, MTSU, uses both terms in the latter format...I just can't find a proper citation to include the staff numbers. My guess is that the "faculty" field came about here to more clearly define the actual numbers of teaching staff compared to general employees. Personally, I don't see how "Academic staff" would be better suited over "Faculty", so long as the displayed link was good and the field descriptor for the template was accurate. -- Huntster ^{T • @ • C} 12:35, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Well the first major problem is that "faculty" is using a very US specific term that (in this context) is meaningless to large parts of the world (and indeed confusing where "faculty" only means an academic division). The current instructions here are:

Number of faculty (staff) members. Use for North American universities, or jurisdictions where 'faculty' commonly carries this meaning; otherwise use staff

Number of teaching staff. For North American universities, use faculty.

So at the moment the links aren't actually going to what the instructions say. And "faculty" is being used for non-North American universities such as King's College London and Monash University even though a glance at their websites suggest that the term isn't used in this context.

"Faculty" wasn't created as a separate field because of an attempt to differentiate between academic staff and all staff, but is a hangover from when there were national specific templates. I don't see why "academic staff" isn't a better term that would a) make it much clearer what is actually being referred to, b) be workabe across the ball and c) cut another field on a bloated template. Timrollpickering 13:06, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

From the Manual of Style, "Wikipedia tries to find words that are common to all varieties of English." My reading of this is that, even in articles about US universities, if a word or phrase is available that will be readily understandable to users of all varieties of English, that should be used in preference to a term common only in one variety. I would have thought that 'Academic Staff' was a good fit for such a phrase, but perhaps there are subtleties I'm missing. TSP 13:25, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

How about "Instructional staff"? "Academic staff" is also very broad and likely too broad. In any case, it would be best to firmly define the term or at least acknowledge that it is ill-defined or broad in the template doc or usage instructions. --ElKevbo 16:37, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

To me, "instructional staff" would mean "teaching staff" (so why not just say that?), but it excludes researchers who teach little. I have quite a firm definition in my mind of what "academic staff" are and I'm not sure how it's possible to be vague about that. The (UK) universities whose statistics I've seen generally only distinguish between academics and support staff (office admins, accountants, security types, cleaners) in their figures. — mholland (talk) 17:35, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Damn you and your "researchers!" (says the PhD student working in a research center :). You're right - scratch that idea.

The primary constituency I see possibly being left out of a "Academic staff" v. "Non-academic staff" dichotomy are, in the US at least, student affairs professionals. It's not a terribly gray area but it's definitely gray enough to raise concerns. I *dare* someone to raise the "learning only happens in classrooms" argument. :) --ElKevbo 17:52, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

What exactly are "instructional staff"? A Google search for "instructional staff" and "university" brings up almost exclusively US institutions, several of which seem to use it alongside "faculty" as if the two are separate: e.g. [2] [3] [4] and a rare non-US one in Germany [5]. If this term isn't used outside the US it's going to cause most of the problems "faculty" does and if it's not clear just what it encompasses then we're going to get very different entries. What is too broad about "academic staff"? Timrollpickering 17:37, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Ok. So what exactly are we trying to capture with "Faculty" and what exactly is the objection to the term? I appreciate that it might not be the perfect term from an international perspective but I'm afraid that there isn't a better alternative. It's pretty close and I think it's close enough to live with, particularly since we can't seem to find any good, universal alternatives. IIRC, this isn't the first time we've had this discussion... --ElKevbo 17:52, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure what we're trying to capture with it, and that's the objection to it :-) It doesn't even seem to be like 'gasoline', which, while we may be unfamiliar with it, most of us can silently rewrite to 'petrol'; many if not most non-North American readers will not really know what is conveyed by 'faculty', which makes it an undesirable word to use in an international encyclopedia (as well as the fact that the term has a separate and entirely different meaning in other English-speaking countries). We have had this discussion before, and it's ended inconclusively, with some users insisting that no other term can quite capture the essence of 'faculty'; the problem is that a number attached to 'faculty' communicates little information to many of Wikipedia's users. TSP 18:51, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

To answer the question of what faculty generally means in the US: In general, it captures both those who teach classes as well as those who are full-time researchers. Sometimes (often?) librarians are also faculty but that's not always the case. Philosophically, the idea is that the faculty are the "core" of the institution and its mission which is why there are often governance battles between faculty and administrators. In practical terms, the distinction between faculty and non-faculty not only has legal implications (academic freedom, unionization, etc.) but also presents many issues related to class and privilege.

To generalize most broadly, I would guess that the intent behind the "Faculty" parameter is to capture those non-students who teach or perform research as those are considered to be the core of the institutional mission ("generate and disseminate knowledge"). That differentiates them from the other staff members whose jobs are not primarily linked to teaching or research but are necessary for the operation of large, complex modern organizations - human resources, physical plant, finances, legal affairs, marketing and communications, etc. --ElKevbo 19:50, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Okay to sum up my problems with the "faculty" field:

1). Currently the instructions present it as an alternative to "staff" aka "employee", not as a specific sub-set as you seem to be arguing. for its use.

2). It's appearing on boxes for universities in countries where "faculty" doesn't have this meaning, probably because "staff" isn't conveying what is meant and "academic staff" isn't available.

3). Internationally "faculty" has more than one meaning in higher education (indeed what is the standard US name for, say, a "Faculty of Humanities"?) and this has contributed to confusion.

4). Every definition people are giving "of what faculty generally means in the US" are precisely what most us think of as "academic staff" - both people actually teaching and researchers. Indeed Faculty (university)#North American usage says precisely that the word "faculty" has also come to be used as a collective noun for the academic staff of a university (my bold).

What exactly are the "student affairs professionals" which seem to be the sticking point on "academic staff"? Timrollpickering 21:22, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

I'd be fine with changing the parameter to "Academic staff" as long as the term is well-defined or useful examples presented for its use. Would it be more clear to also change "Staff" to "Administrative staff" or add that as a new field with the understanding that both Academic and Administrative Staff are subsets of Staff?

The Student Affairs issue isn't really worth worrying about as long as it's all clearly defined. To answer your question, however, in the US (and other countries, too, but my education and experience is limited to the US) those are the folks who run the cocurricular activities and services such as advising student organizations, managing the developmental programs in residence halls, providing counseling services, running athletics, etc. There is still a very strong educational component to those programs but they take place outside of the classroom. --ElKevbo 21:56, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

(←) After reading all this, "Academic staff" seems fine for replacing "Faculty", because they both focus on the teaching and research side of things. However, I cannot see "Staff" being easily manipulated into anything else. It just seems like there should be a distinguishment between academic and non-academic staff; I know I've seen university websites use two separate figures to describe them. "Admin staff" and "Student Affairs staff" seems overly narrow when the field should theoretically describe all employees not covered by "Academic staff". Perhaps I'm wishing for too much? -- Huntster ^{T • @ • C} 00:05, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

"Other staff"? TSP 23:40, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

Once again, I think "Academic staff" and "Admin staff" are perfectly fine as long we define our terms in the usage docs and other relevant places. --ElKevbo 00:18, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Agree. Timrollpickering 14:27, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Template malfunctioning

This template isn't working right at Institute of Business Administration, University of Dhaka. The image isn't showing and the longish vision statement is showing in strange broken pieces. Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 14:08, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

I've fixed the vision statement (though that's a pretty long thing to include in an infobox - you may want to consider moving it into the main article). The image looks OK to me.... TSP 14:25, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Section names

Some of these may need renaming, even if they're not displayed, because of debate over what they actually mean.

Please take a look at Talk:Queen's University Belfast for debate over whether the Irish version of the name should be displayed.

Also "state" and "country" are spawning edit wars on many UK university articles, particularly over whether it should be filled in "state=Scotland; country=United Kingdom" or just "state= ; country=Scotland". I'm reluctant to add fields, but if we have "province" and "state", would "constituent country" be a handy addition? Timrollpickering 10:08, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Some problems

This template seems to force a hierarchy that's not accurate for all schools. Chancellors don't always outrank presidents, I think that vice-presidents seldom outrank the provost, etc. I noticed this because Georgetown University, which is currently a Featured Article Candidate, has the #2 official at the university, the provost, below the vice-president. This seems, to me at least, to suggest an inaccurate ranking. Is this problem present in other templates? --JayHenry 00:33, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure it's accurate to say that the template "forces a hierarchy". It's just the order the parameters appear in. We could shuffle them around to suit Georgetown, but it would only make them "wrong" for somewhere else. Perhaps if we altered the documentation to suggest that only one, or at most two, of the "head" params are used in any single box. That's what the fields are designed for - identifying the head of the institution. In the UK, universities have a ceremonial head and an executive head, so both Chancellor and Vice-chancellor are in common use; colleges often have just a Principal, so just that name appears.

Almost all institutions have at least three or four of the options available (they're all common academic titles), but only one of them is in charge. Would editors of Georgetown University object to pruning back the officers? — mholland (talk) 01:10, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, it's just too bad there's no easy way to reorder those parameters. Meh, I guess it's not a big deal... an issue that can be sorted out on various talk pages. No reason to rewrite the template. --JayHenry 01:16, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

I kind of agree, although are there any universities with both a chancellor and rector where the latter outranks the former? I'm not sure how feasible this would be to work out, but some of the hierarchy may be near universal when both titles are used and the box can cause confusion - the articles Rector and Chancellor (education) suggest the two are primarily alternative titles but when there's both then the Rector is not the number 1 (e.g. the Scottish Ancients). Timrollpickering 17:21, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

There sort of is a way to re-order, though I don't know that I'd want to recommend it. Using head_label and head automatically puts that entry at the bottom, so could be used to resort Vice-President below Provost if it was felt that it was a big issue at Georgetown. I'd rather this wasn't used, but irregular markup is probably preferable to a confusing result.

I'd support advice that only the top two or three positions should be included, though. I don't know if such advice would actually have any effect.... TSP 17:54, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

I agree with mholland (talk), we needn't change the template. The positional parameters are not supposed to each be used, it's for one person. I don't think it's important who the VP is if we know who the President is, same with the Rector and President. Although some systems may be different, I think only the top official should be noted in the infobox. -- Noetic Sage 20:18, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

In that case, would 'Vice-President' ever be used?

In the English university system, we definitely need 'Chancellor' and 'Vice-Chancellor' - the Chancellor is the ceremonial head of the organisation, the Vice-Chancellor is the operational head. To list just one would be like having a UK infobox which omitted either the Queen or the Prime Minister.

I think two is nearly always enough, though. TSP 20:32, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Well many systems are different and in UK universities (and possibly others in the Commonwealth) the headship of a university is de facto split with the Chancellor nominally the head of the head of the university but in practice playing a passive role (sometimes as little as turning up once a year to put on robes and confer degrees, although many Chancellors have taken a much greater, though nominally informal, role and are lobbyists & fundraisers for their universities) and the Vice Chancellor (sometimes called the Principal and some rather confusingly seem to hold both job titles) the day to day executive. Although the Vice Chancellor is formally below the Chancellor, in practice the VC is the one who sets the day to day direction of the university. The very first return on Google for "university head" is this listing of UK Vice Chancellors. It would be strange to list one and not the other - like having only the head of state and not the head of government in a country infobox.

The Rector in Scottish universities is a relatively unique position, being elected by the students and traditionally chairing the university court, but one that does attract a lot of public attention and the lists of past rectors (see Category:Rectors of Scottish universities) contain a lot of the big names in politics and academia in their generation, and more recently a mixture of Scottish politicians, celebrities (although quite a number of the celebrities have been quite dedicated rectors like John Cleese and Stephen Fry) and even students (current Prime Minister Gordon Brown was Rector of Edinburgh whilst a student there and it's no coincidence that the regulations were subsequently changed to prevent another standing!). Rectorial elections often attract attention in the press and the holder can be a key figure both internally and externally. Certainly they would be listed in the basic info for a university. Timrollpickering

New parameter for infobox: former names

I added a new parameter devoted to former names of colleges and universities. Problem is the parameter only showed up in articles such as Texas State University and not in others like University of Houston. What did I do wrong and how can it be corrected in the future? GETONERD84 02:57, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Template has been fixed; please see this diff for what I corrected. You may notice that the reason it was showing up for "Texas State University" is because that article used the "free_label" field as well, and "University of Houston" did not. -- Huntster ^{T • @ • C} 07:53, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Hofstra University

Could someon take a look at this article Hofstra University. I can't seem to get the phone number and former names to display. Mbisanz (talk) 07:17, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

The parameter for former names is called former_names (including underscore!). The telephone param has been removed on the basis that Wikipedia is not a directory. I've corrected the template at Hofstra University and removed a few duplicated params which could cause some confusion too. — mholland (talk) 10:35, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Looks great. Much obliged Mbisanz (talk) 18:59, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Full code and documentation update

Okay, so based on the above Extraordinarily bloated section and a gentle nudge by User:KnightLago, I've rewritten the code for the template, removing those fields discussed. I've also rewritten the documentation to present it in a bit more cohesive fashion. Note that I have not touched anything to do with the "faculty/staff" debate. Once any discussion or debate has died down, perhaps it might be prudent to protect the template, given the significant number of changes that instigated this rewrite in the first place? -- Huntster ^{T • @ • C} 01:04, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

School colors is a required field?

A small college in afghaninstan with no sports program is supposed to have school colors? Seems we should make that field optional. -MarsRover (talk) 19:58, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

I think it's meant to be optional, but it indeed doesn't seem to be. Pretty sure that's a bug - I'll have a look.... TSP (talk) 20:42, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

I think I've fixed it - just a missing brace. Let me know if I haven't or if I've broken something else in the process! TSP (talk) 20:45, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, that is an optional field. It was my coding mistake...thanks for the fix. -- Huntster ^{T • @ • C} 21:02, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, Thanks. That's much better. MarsRover (talk) 03:10, 27 November 2007 (UTC)