User:Sammi Brie/Infobox radio station revamp/Explanation

This proposal contemplates a redesign of Template:Infobox radio station and Template:Infobox broadcast (which should really be "Infobox television station"), two infoboxes that share many fields but are specialized for radio and television stations.

Why?

These two infoboxes describe similar—yet distinct—items and share about 20 fields. However, they have differing capabilities:

• Infobox broadcast allows for the insertion of a logo and an image (see Wowow), but only Infobox radio station provides for an image caption.
• Infobox radio station has described TemplateData, making it more intuitive to use with VisualEditor; Infobox broadcast does not.
• Infobox broadcast provides for the automatic provision of FCC license information data for US stations. (It would take some template work to apply this to radio because of the syntax of the FCC's pages, particularly for public files)
• Infobox radio station has several fields that are not as useful in the US but which aid in writing articles elsewhere.

Other reasons for a design change:

• The order of fields is radically different between the two. The Owner field is eighth in Infobox broadcast but 24th in order in Infobox radio station.
• Eight fields that appear identical have different names. For instance, website in Infobox radio station is homepage in Infobox broadcast.
• A bug in Infobox broadcast related to the FCC license data causes stations with headers mentioning they are satellites of other stations to screw up the infobox a bit, like KFVE. above is implemented for the first time in either of these boxes to provide a field to label semi- and full satellites for TV and simulcasts in radio.
• These templates contain quite a lot of information (some 25 different fields), and headers like the ones I use in this proposal help organize the information thematically for the reader's benefit. This is loosely done without headers by Infobox broadcast and to an even lesser extent by Infobox radio station.

As part of the change, some parameters relevant to both are being brought to the other template for the first time, like subchannels to radio and former_names and repeater to television. This also supports efforts to internationalize these templates to permit better use on articles not covering the United States.

Minor differences do remain, particularly with the location/country fields of Infobox broadcast. The aim is that implementation requires, at most, a bot to edit transclusions to fix field names.

What?

See User:Raymie/Infobox broadcast revamp/Example and User:Raymie/Infobox radio station revamp/Example for example uses.