Template talk:PersonalRecordsTop

Alternative to this template

The creator of this template obviously thought the same as I did when I tabulated some speed skaters' PRs to improve the clarity of that important information. Consider my efforts at Anni Friesinger and Cindy Klassen. I'd argue that the table format has a couple of advantages:

1. Being an ordinary table, placed in the article body, it avoids "infobox overflow", the latter to be understood as "what you get when the number of stacked infoboxes to the left or right 'overwhelms' the article text itself, forcing the reader to look to the far bottom of the article, or in many cases even worse, forcing her/him to scroll down the page below the text, in order to get to the information placed in the lowermost infobox".
2. The table has access to the whole width of the article page (at least if placed below any other infoboxes), thus allowing for more information while still being readable---an example of such extra information being the name of the skating event where each record was set, providing the reader with a significant extra part of the context of the record, as compared to just giving the place and date.

Any comments? --Wernher 02:08, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Suggestions

I have added a lot of "personal records" and "world records" tables to the articles of speed skaters. See, for instance, Igor Zhelezovski. While I prefer the "look" of the actual table I made, I am not going to argue that because there's no arguing taste. However, I should like to make some suggestions:

1. "Distance" is not a good enough description of the column in question because personal records can also include samalog points/scores. That is why I used "Event" instead.
2. "Time" vs. "Result" for the same reason.
3. "Location" vs. "Venue": I hope that at some point, Wikipedia will have articles on most venues, like, for instance Thialf, Olympic Oval, Eisstadion Davos, Eisstadion Inzell, ... . I think this is much more informative than just listing in which city it was achieved. Yes, for now, I have listed the city, but, as far as possible, I have also actually linked those to the actual skating rink in which it was set. I have to go back at some point to those articles and make them actually display "Thialf", "Olympic Oval", etc.
4. World Record at the time. I think this column should be included as well, because it shows much better how good a skater was at the events in question. All of a skater's personal records may actually have been very close to, or even improvements of, the world records at the time, but if the current world records are much better, that does not show in a convient way how good that skater really was. I also noticed some articles (for instance, Ådne Søndrål) where people replaced my table with your template, in the process losing this information... :( :(
5. Also note how in my tables, I made all columns right-aligned, except for the left-aligned "Venue" column. I think it looks better this way, because the several rows in the columns show things nicely aligned then. Also note that some skaters have some personal record times that were clocked to 1/10ths of a second and others that were clocked to 1/100ths of a second. In these cases (so when personal records of a skater have mixed accuracy/resolution), to make everything still nicely aligned, the ones measured in 1/10ths should have   added to them;   does not do the job nicely (see, for instance Sten Stensen (where I used  ) vs. Nikolay Gulyayev (where I used  ). As for the date, note that this alignment still applies in case dates like "2007-11-26" are used, because users can change the way dates are displayed in their preferences.
6. A minor note is that "PersonalRecords*" does not indicate that it is useful for speed skating, but may not be useful for other sports. And also note that the descriptions "Event" instead of "Distance" and "Result" instead of "Time" that I am suggesting make the "PersonalRecords*" templates useful for a lot more sports.

I am making these suggestions because I am much more reluctant to significantly modify templates than articles. Somehow, a template seems more "personal" to me than an article. At the same time, I of course appreciate your effort because templates give a much more overall consistent look to Wikipedia. Thanks for your consideration. wjmt (talk) 03:19, 27 November 2007 (UTC)