Wikipedia:Misinformation on infoboxes
 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: An article may turn out to benefit from an infobox. Do not reject one out of hand just because it's your article. |
| Rationale | Sometimes even the most erudite of scholars just wants to check a key fact about a topic. A well-crafted infobox gives exactly that opportunity, as well as providing structured data and microformats for third-parties to reuse. |
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A lot of misinformation is written about infoboxes and Wikipedia:Disinfoboxes is a prime example. Although it is true that no infobox is required or prohibited, infoboxes are often expected in articles. Close to 3 million infoboxes are in our 6,909,726 articles, and around 75% of featured articles have an infobox. It's not surprising then, that an editor may ask "Why hasn't this article got an infobox?" We need to ensure that decisions taken on whether to include an infobox – and more importantly what goes in it – are made on the basis of reason, not capricious expressions of "I don't like them", nor the sort of misinformation which is commonly spread.
Problems
[edit]When a group of editors who work together decide that they don't like infoboxes, they tend to reinforce each other's prejudice and create a culture of rejecting infoboxes without even examining the pros and cons. It's not unusual for those who ask about whether a particular article should have an infobox to be met with condescension or even outright hostility.
Such a clique of editors are not interested in what best serves an article – or more importantly what best serves those who read it or reuse it – but in their own feeling that they know what is best for their article; they will often demonstrate a view that the opinions of other editors who were not involved to date in the article are intrinsically less worthy of consideration than their own.
Common myths
[edit]- "An infobox is redundant to the lead": Just as the lead is redundant to the rest of the article because it summarises the article, an infobox should provide a very concise presentation of the key facts in the article. It would indeed be strange to find information in a good infobox that wasn't present in well-written lead. The lead allows the visitor to get a two-minute overview of the topic, while the infobox should present an "at-a-glance" display of the most salient facts.
- "An infobox has to be less than a certain fraction of the size of the article": Generalisations such as that ignore the wide variety in size that exists in our articles. One well-developed article may extend to several screenfuls of text, including numerous images, yet a suitable infobox might still occupy only the whitespace to the right of the table-of-contents. An underdeveloped start-class article may have an infobox that is half its vertical size, yet still afford a good summary of the most important facts buried within the as-yet-unstructured text.
- "An infobox should always contain more than just half-a-dozen pieces of information": Infoboxes should only contain key information – and then only facts that are capable of being expressed concisely. The information in an infobox should not attempt to shoehorn nuanced information into a mislabeled row of an infobox. For example, we don't know exactly when Ludwig van Beethoven was born. Although we can guess (and the French Wikipedia does!), based on when he was baptised, that discussion is not capable of being reduced to an entry for date-of-birth and an infobox should not contain it. It may well be that for a particular individual, the only seven certain or uncontested facts are their full name, their date and place of birth and death, their occupation and what they looked like; having that information collected together in a structured manner for quick reference and easy reuse is a service to our visitors and generally will improve an article.
- "Infoboxes shouldn't contain multiple entries for any field": Henry VIII of England had six wives. It would be an odd infobox indeed that only listed one of them. Following the myth about multiple entries would lead an editor to conclude that despite having two parents, Angelina Jolie should only have one of them mentioned in her infobox.
Added value of infoboxes
[edit]- An infobox contains a brief collection of the key facts about a topic, for example in a biography: date and place of birth and death; age at death; principal occupations and accomplishments. It is placed in a position familiar to visitors and enables them to get that information at a glance in the same way that they are accustomed to in over 2,500,000 other Wikipedia articles.
- The information in an infobox is arranged as "key-value" pairs in a table that allows natural language processing tools to read that information with a much higher degree of certainty and to more accurately glean information from other parts of the article.
- The data in an infobox is emitted as a microformat, for example the following: vcard, bday, dday, deathdate, role. These microformats may be collected through many data collection tools used by third-parties who make use of the microformats to re-use our articles.
- We have a sister project called Wikidata that collects data from all Wikipedias to create a central repository of information. This allows different language Wikipedias to use data provided by another Wikipedia. In particular, the 4.5 million-article English Wikipedia is a valuable - and regularly updated - source of facts for smaller Wikipedias to build articles upon. The infobox is the principal source of data for Wikidata and an article with an infobox offers that facility to Wikidata, and hence to other small Wikipedias.