Drafting guideline text

Currently at MOS:INFOBOXUSE. Discussion, notes, etc, regarding specific lines are contained in ref tags. Feel free to add some more ref notes, add thoughts to an existing one, or revise the text. More general discussion can be moved outside of the tags to a sub section.

Old text: The use of infoboxes is neither required nor prohibited for any article. Whether to include an infobox, which infobox to include, and which parts of the infobox to use, is determined through discussion and consensus among the editors at each individual article.

New text

The use of infoboxes is recommended for articles on specific biological classifications, chemical elements and compounds, events, people, settlements, and similar topics with a narrow and well-defined scope. Broad topics and overview articles like philosophy, time, or Mathematics are usually better served by navigational sidebars like {{philosophy sidebar}}, {{time sidebar}}, or {{math topics sidebar}}. Stubs are usually too short to warrant an infobox, and infoboxes on them often attract edits expanding the infobox rather than expanding the article.
Where infoboxes are used, they should neither be too short nor too long. They should contain basic facts which readers would reasonably be looking for at a glance like date of birth for people or number of protons in an element. Infoboxes should not be used as repositories for any odd bit of information related to the subject because the visual clutter can make it harder for readers to find the most important information quickly. If information is important but too complex to distill into an infobox, consider using a link to a section or dedicated article on the topic. For example, instead of trying to decide which of Mozart's works should be listed in the infobox, the "works" field is a link to List of compositions by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

References

Table of previous discussions

RfCs on Infoboxes in the last 2 years
Article	Date closed	Result	Closer	Notes
Felix Mendelssohn	August 11, 2023	Consensus	starship.paint	Participants reference an eye-tracking study to demonstrate usefulness of infoboxes to readers
Richard Wagner	August 5, 2023	Consensus	Charcoal feather	"2/3 supermajority"
Colleen Ballinger	May 17, 2023	Consensus	ScottishFinnishRadish	"clear consensus", ~74% support
Rod Steiger	March 31, 2023	Consensus	Nemov	21 yes to 2 no
Mozart	February 2023	rough consensus in favor	unclosed
Jenny Lind	February 23, 2023	Consensus	ScottishFinnishRadish	"[Infobox] passed RFA without a crat chat [...] objections raised clearly did not have enough traction to convince more than a quarter of the participants"
James Joyce	January 25, 2023	Consensus	Ingenuity	specifies some parameters to include and exclude
Claude Debussy	January 18, 2023	No consensus	Red-tailed hawk	Roughly even numbers attending, no consensus due to MOS being neutral on issue
Maddie Ziegler	December 31, 2022	No consensus	Isabelle Belato
Tchaikovsky	January 3, 2023	Consensus	Gusfriend
Laurence Olivier	November 27, 2022	Consensus	Red-tailed hawk	detailed overview of arguments for and against
Peter Sellers	February 26, 2022	Consensus (see note)	Iamreallygoodatcheckers	Discussion specifically about uncollapsing the infobox which was an idiosyncrasy of the page
Stanley Kubrick	November 15, 2021	Consensus	Tol
Ian Fleming	March 4, 2021	Consensus	Wugapodes

General chatter

Content below is transcluded from the talk page

Some pings

@ScottishFinnishRadish and Red-tailed hawk: I see you both have been relatively active in closing infobox RfCs since I last waded in. Penny for your thoughts? There seems to be a relatively consistent, project-wide consensus in favor of inclusion of infoboxes given the list I've compiled (largely from Gerda Arendt's user pages, so if I've missed any please let me know, I'd like to be comprehensive). I'd be interested in what you both think should be included in a proposed text, especially ways to incorporate the insight from your closes as caveats or considerations. You'll see in the interlinear glosses some places where I left questions along those lines. — Wug·a·po·des 09:11, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for the initiative. I suggest to include Brianboulton's 2013 essay in the reasoning, because he is an authority some of those rejecting infoboxes (at least for classical composers and certain poets) may accept. It also shows that the acceptance of infoboxes as a normal feature has a long history. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:25, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

One more: the old wording about "consensus on each article's talk page" has been understood - perhaps misunderstood? - that you may not add an infobox without having found consensus before. We have countless hidden notices in composers' articles (see Debussy, Verdi), and I don't believe that they were ever compatible with the concept "any user can edit". --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:09, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

detail in text "all compositions by Mozart", that's not possible ;) - Mozart's compositions with K. numbers run beyond 600. The idea is: don't argue which compositions are worth mentioning - which is a matter of taste - but link to the list. The lead can highlight genres or individual works.

other idea: I believe that for biographies, DOB, POB, DOD and POD should be filled if known. I have been reverted, see Samuel Barber.

I have not attended the two discussions that ended in no consensus, because I knew that their principal authors don't like infoboxes, and others may have done the same. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:23, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

I've changed the Mozart example and incorporated some insight from the 2013 essay. W/r/t hidden notes, at the moment I think those are justified (well, Debussy at least). Since previous discussions resulted in not having one, it's better to seek consensus first, and a hidden comment is a normal way to note that. W/r/t what vital stats to include, I think it's better (at this stage) to leave out specifics and leave what is most important as an issue for local consensus at the article or wikiproject level. W/r/t the no consensus closures, I haven't studied them closely but I share the intuition that they're odd. At the very least, they weren't consensus against so saying "usually but not always" seems strongly supported even taking them at face value. — Wug·a·po·des 21:41, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

@Wugapodes: Something I'm seeing is that all of the infobox discussions that you've noted in the list appear to be about infoboxes of biographies. My understanding of the dispute on infobox use that flares up every so often is that it's largely focused on how we apply infoboxes to biographies. The text at the beginning of the proposal (i.e. The use of infoboxes is recommended but not required) has considerably broader scope than the examples being cited. I imagine that most people are not going to want infoboxes for broad concept articles on abstract things (think: philosophy, time, Mathematics, and the like); when there's a box for these sorts of topics in the lead section, it tends to be a navbox. But if the point of the RfC is to come to a coherent community consensus about the active dispute, might it be more direct to launch an RfC that provides guidance specific to whether/how infoboxes should be used in biographies? — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 02:29, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

@Red-tailed hawk: I think a relatively broad recommendation is appropriate given current practice. Nearly every taxon, element, chemical, and settlement (to name a few) has an infobox. The RfCs are all on biographies because biographies are the last place where challenging an infobox is seen as acceptable. We don't have RfCs on taxa or settlements because there's an implicit consensus that they are a benefit and removing one would be seen as WP:POINTy disruption. I think limiting it to biographies misses out on documenting what is already an implicit consensus elsewhere. Part of that implicit consensus, which I think you pick up on with your examples, is that broad topics are better served by sidebars than infoboxes. I think that's actually a handy heuristic. I've tried to edit the text to better reflect all that. — Wug·a·po·des 19:56, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

I question "flares up every so often". I don't recall a single RfC in 2018 to 2021, or actually to the end of 2022. Even those coming then were not "often". I wonder why any new RfC would have been needed after Mozart, where the typical 10-bullet-list of concerns had been eloquently refuted by Voceditenore (which many others had tried in earlier RfCs and discussions).

The dislike of infobox by some editors is not restricted to biographies. Just today I had reason to look at this gem of an edit for a classical concerto, and more recently my addition of infobox opera was not welcome. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:33, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

Fair enough; it seems like the area of dispute is broader than I had understood it to be. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 02:26, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

But the number of those who dislike is perhaps smaller than you think. I wonder if talking to those selected few, a single digit number, might be an easier way than an RfC that would keep many busy. In the past, there were around five users who would regularly revert infoboxes (a few of those in the history of Debussy), and at present, I see only Nikkimaria still doing that. I tried to talk to her and failed, but others - with less burden of a history - might be understood better. A simple compromise infobox in the style of Mozart and Beethoven would harm no article, not Cosima Wagner, not Debussy. The amount of arguments around five extra lines, standard for the beginning of biographies, is beyond my understanding. I was converted from finding infoboxes redundant to supporting them in one discussion, Talk:Samuel Barber/Archive 2#Infobox, in 2012, by "Unless, of course, someone wishes to argue that Barber was not a person..." ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:22, 30 August 2023 (UTC)