Wikipedia talk:Disinfoboxes

Comments

You perhaps also forget - "Battle of the infobox" - Rival WikiProjects battling to have their infobox first - dreadful compromise is usually.......more infoboxes. See Wetman's elegant solution at Ponte Vecchio and mine at User:Joopercoopers/Origins and architecture of the Taj Mahal (which is a different approach to articles in general really - ie. shunt all the none prose stuff to 'at hand' tabs. Discussion welcome at User:Joopercoopers/Tabbed articles. Regards --Joopercoopers (talk) 15:58, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the Ponte Vecchio example. I used it as a perfect illustration. As to forgetting the "battle of the infobox", I haven't. I just am not sure whether or not I want to address it. My personal feeling is that wikiprojects should not make blanket requirements for infoboxes but the use and structure of infoboxes should remain flexible to meet each individual article's needs. However, I have no problem with a project banning infoboxes if they prove to be problematic within a patricular series or topic of articles.Nrswanson (talk) 20:09, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Repeating content may be unnecessary for human readers, however for knowledge-extraction projects like dbpedia which gets most of it's information from infoboxes it is really useful. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 139.18.249.148 (talk) 19:57, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

What I loathe about infoboxes

Pasted in from Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Composers/Infoboxes_RfC#What_I_loathe_about_infoboxes.

1. Undisciplined expansiveness: A maximum-inclusion approach to fields that leads editors to place repetitive, sometimes downright silly information in the box. (There needs to be clear, prominent advice about not using every single field in every circumstance, and rather the need to ration the information, shaping it to the context.)
2. Visual degradation: The way infoboxes squash the text to the left, particularly on smaller screens, and restrict the sizing of the lead picture.
3. Prefabrication: The prefabricated feel infoboxes give to articles: here's quick and dirty info if you can't be bothered to read on—the very name of the boxes says it all.
4. Disconnected particles. Their domination of the very opening of an article with chopped up morsels that seem to contradict the continuous, connected form and style of the running prose. (If the justification is that adding an infobox provides both genres, the problem is this utter visual domination at the top—and see the next point.)
5. Uncertain benefit for readers: The failure of anyone who promotes infoboxes to explain how they are read. (Do readers look at them first, before embarking on the lead? Does the existence of infoboxes encourage readers not to absorb the main text? Do readers hop from article to article looking only at infoboxes—an argument I've heard put for retaining blue-carpeted linking practices within infoboxes? Do readers just glance quickly at the infobox and then read the article proper—in which case, what is the relationship between the infobox and the rest, and does the former reduce the impact of the latter through pre-empting basic information that the reader will encounter in thee running prose? What functionality is missing when an article does not have an infobox?)
6. Better as lists: The fact that infobox information seems, in design, to be for comparison between topics. (If this is the case, the information would be far, far better in a WP List, where the form is much better suited to comparison, and the relationship betwee lead and table can be made to work very well indeed; see "Featured lists" for what I mean.)

Infoboxes seem to pander to the lowest concentration span. Their premise seems to be that readers can't absorb the key facts from extended text, or that they want isolated factoids hammered into a prefabricated shape. They judder against the lead as a summary of the main text, but are prone to deceive (not by purpose, but in effect). Their inclusion would be derided in any culture that wasn't saturated with 30-second television ads and news broadcasts featuring 5- to 10-second grabs from politicians, PR consultants and disaster witnesses. Infoboxes are at loggerheads with WP's goal of providing reliable, deep information about the world; they intrude between readers and their all-important engagement with the opening of the main text.

Infoboxes should be used only occasionally, with great care. They should not be a formulaic part of articles. Those who are pushing the project to accept this cancer everywhere would be better putting their energy into creating more lists. Tony (talk) 04:19, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

FYI

To any editors or readers who come upon this page you may also enjoy a quick peek at this pic [1]. Enjoy MarnetteD | Talk 20:57, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for this page!

I've been wondering if there was any sanity around Wikipedia concerning those accursed infoboxes! Sincerely, GeorgeLouis (talk) 00:14, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Infoboxes are good as abstracts

Infoboxes are useful as a summary about an article in one area.Northamerica1000 (talk) 15:26, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Debate on this subject

Anyone reading this page, might be interested in the debate currently being held here.  Giano  10:23, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

Enforcement of parameters in infoboxes? Requesting comment

As "parameter creep" is one of the issues that raises disinfoboxers' ire, I thought you might want to see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Infoboxes#Enforcing infobox parameters (or not)?

The gist: I cut down the number of parameters used in the infobox for the article I wrote for The End of the Road (a novel) with the intention of making the infobox generally applicable to all the many editions of the book. Three editors at WikiProject:Novels have decided that the infobox must contain ISBN, page count, publisher, and cover image of the first edition, and recommend adding even more (including the Dewey decimal number). Curly Turkey (gobble) 02:58, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

Disinformation in this essay

Infoboxes are strictly optional: no policy or guideline either requires or prohibits the inclusion of an infobox on any article.

This is quite misleading. Policies rarely cover such stylistic issues about articles. Guidelines are just that – guidelines – and thus do not strictly require or prohibit anything. In truth, many guidelines and other advice pages encourage the use of infoboxes. Eg:

• Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Philosophy#Infobox

"The first thing in any philosopher article should usually be an infobox."

• Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Novels#Infobox

"Note that including an infobox is advisable; include one if sufficient information is available."

• Wikipedia:WikiProject_Years#Infobox

"Each year should have an infobox at the top right."

Adrian J. Hunter^{(talk•contribs)} 13:08, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

A WP:TAXOBOX infobox is also effectively a requirement on organism (species, genus, etc.) articles. While as AJH points out, there's no policy requiring it (because it's not a policy matter), it's a standard feature. If you leave one off, someone will add it. If you delete one, you will be reverted.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:02, 9 September 2021 (UTC)

Presenting both sides of the question, to be fair

Wikipedia:WikiProject Composers#Biographical infoboxes. Let us not suppress one side of the debate, Adrian! Tim riley talk 21:01, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

Not every Wikipedia article requires an infobox. In fact, most articles don't.

Can anyone back up this assertion with data? Excluding stubs and disambiguation pages, I find very few box-less pages in article-space. Tarc (talk) 17:30, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

RfC: Wikidata in infoboxes, opt-in or opt-out?

Wikidata has begun to be automatically imported into infobox fields. Should this be opt-in or opt-out? Please take part in the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#RfC: Wikidata in infoboxes, opt-in or opt-out?. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 01:18, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Various problems that make this essay rather less than cogent

The title of the essay is misleading, since virtually none of the extant or projected examples and parameters they contain are actually cases of disinformation at all. The only actual cases of disinformation are the doubly-misleading "Years active" parameter in example #1, and the three dates of construction in example #3. Its other problem, the weird "vehicles and pedestrians?" thing, is just a copyediting problem (it's simply unencyclopedic writing). In all three of these cases, the problem is fixed by deleting or correcting the parameter. The essay's suggestion that these parameters could not be easily fixed is fallacious, as is the suggestion that the infobox must go if it contains a parameter that has incorrect or suboptimal information in it. "Your finger is broken, which can't be fixed, so we are digging a grave for you. Please lie here, for your impending euthanasia." The fixes were actually trivial. The dates range for the actor should have run from first sourced role to last, or just been omitted if we thought our information was incomplete; the bridge date should have only been the last of these dates, since previous bridges on the same site are not this bridge; and the bridge type should have been "pedestrian", since it is no longer a vehicle bridge ("pedestrian, formerly vehicle" would also have been permissible). I'm tempted to throw in a "Well, duhhh" here, and roll my eyes. These correction are obvious and non-complicated, of exactly the same sort we encounter every day in editing regular article text.

Of the five supposed "red-flag" criteria, only the last one, "If the infobox contains subjective categories, it is a disinfobox", has anything potentially to do with disinformation, and even that statement is incorrect (a correct statement would be "...may be a disinfobox" [aside from the fact that the label "disinfobox" is itself disinformation!], since in any given the case the categorization may prove to be correct even if the initial reasons for adding it were subjective. The five mostly nonsensical red flags do not actually include the obvious and unquestionable one, the inclusion of incorrect or misleading statements in an attempt to fill parameters just for the sake of filling them, as in the "Years active" example. It's comparable to someone starting an essay about WP:V compliance, then wandering off into a rant about capitalization style and punctuation, and never coming back.

The first example (the male one) does not clearly make the point of the essay at all. It contains a single problem, an inaccurate summary of years active, which should simply be removed like any other bit of inaccurate writing anywhere in an article, and it is not illustrative of an infobox-specific problem. Otherwise, is is actually an example of what typical mobile readers (who are now the majority of our readers) would want to see without being forced to read paragraphs of material on a tiny device. It's also, sans that one problem, a good example of what someone trying to figure out just enough context would want (e.g.: "Why was this person's name dropped in this sentence about a film? Is this a director, an actor, a producer, or what? I'll click through to that bio for a second to find out, so I can clarify the article in which the name was dropped by changing "Ron Richardson' to 'director Ron Richardson', 'actor Ron Richardson' or whatever is needed."). The prose about this box gets hyperbolic with "yet again" statements, but it is the first example on the page.

We do not need an entire multi-paragraph section and fake infobox to illustrate a case of putting incorrect information in a single i-box parameter. That entire scenario can be explained in a single sentence. I would suggest replacing this with an example of either: a) a case where the info provided has nothing at all to do with why the topic is notable, e.g. an attempt to fill every possible infobox field, for someone who is notable only as a murder victim; and/or b) a case where an infobox provides no actual information about the subject of the article but only navigation links, and information about something extraneous to but related to the article, e.g. bio details of a composer, and links to other pages about the composer and their works, being used in an infobox on a list of their operas (an actual problem we have right now).

The second example has nothing to do with disinformation at all; it's just excessive formatting around an image, and a redundant statement of occupation without any additional information. Basically, that infobox violates the simple principle that a list contains multiple items or it's not really a list.

To the extent "disinfoboxes" really exist, they're a minimal problem, and not a categorical one. Almost all cases of "disinfoboxes" are fixed by either 1) converting an infobox like example #2 (the female one) which just contains a photo and a single fact covered in the first lead sentence, into a regular photo; 2) removing extraneous trivia from an infobox which can be salvaged and bared down to actually salient facts; or 3) fixing incorrect or unclear statements in parameters.

Ultimately, this entire essay really devolves to "I don't like infoboxes and will use any flaw in one as an excuse to delete the entire template", just disguised behind paragraph after paragraph of hand-waving about really obvious and instantly fixable issues. The frequency of the problems in question can be addressed by simply improving the documentation of infoboxes. The fact of the matter is that different people prefer to receive, and can more effectively process, information in different ways. A great many people, probably nearly all of us, process some information better in some forms, and other types in other forms, and will process the same article different ways depending on why we're at it and what we're looking for at that particular moment. Wikipedia is not "the encyclopedia that only people who like lots of prose paragraphs can use". It is also not "the encyclopedia where people looking for basic facts can be forced to read for ten minutes to get it, just because some WP:OWNer is inordinately proud of their prose".

 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  22:30, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

I disagree completely with the entire concept of this essay

Not every article needs an infobox. Do not add one if it does not provide any value to the article.

Infoboxes provide meta information and semantic content that would otherwise have to be guessed at. For instance, a page about the Atari 2600 is about... what exactly? Do we trust google to figure it out for us? Now that same page with an "infobox game console" states that the Atari 2600 is a game console.

So a page about a person where the infobox replicates the lede does indeed improve the article. Perhaps not within the page itself, but certainly for the other pages and tools that use that information, notably Wikidata. As such, I argue that an infobox provides value to every article, at least until some other mechanism for clear semantic labelling is provided to replace it.

Maury Markowitz (talk) 12:16, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Importance of Infoboxes in semantic web

Hi, according to the proposal of Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of World Wide Web, the current web gradually promotes into semantic web (please read carefully that article). Semantic web means that total web is a huge database that we can request information from it by simple queries. Here you misunderstood the correct importance of Infoboxes in Wikipedia. Infoboxes makes articles machine readable, note that a normal Infobox contains some structured data, or semi-structured data. Some Infobox data is for humans, and some is for machines. I think the correct scenario is this:

1. Create a Infoboxes containing full structured data and as complete as you can (this is for machines)
2. The Wikipedian selects some of that data to view that to the readers of article permanently (this is for humans).
3. An additional button may show the full Infobox to humans (as an option).

Today dear @David Eppstein: reverted my edits here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Factorial&curid=10606&diff=1081085690&oldid=1081083023

I think the writer of this project (i.e., Wikipedia:Disinfoboxes) is not familiar to semantic web concepts and its importance. So please read carefully that idea, and probably apply the scenario I mentioned above. This way all articles (without any exception) should have full Infoboxes, although some of them are completely hidden for humans, and there exists only for machines. Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 07:36, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

You should take this philosophy to Wikidata where it makes more sense. Here on en.Wikipedia we are writing an encyclopedia for people who read and write English, not for machines. If content such as bad infoboxes impedes the understanding of human readers, it should be removed. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:41, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

@David Eppstein Here you write:

Here on en.Wikipedia we are writing an encyclopedia for people who read and write English, not for machines.

I really think that some normal humans (not machines) only need structured data about that concept, and does not like to read long sentences to extract it. The third step in the above scenario is for them. Definitely reading long sentences to extract a small piece of data (i.e., the result of a small query) is a very cumbersome task for humans.

And here you write

You should take this philosophy to Wikidata

In my opinion you are not right. An article should contain full structured and semi-structured data for machines without redirecting machine to other pages. I think there is no redirection in the proposal of Tim Berners Lee, and his idea says embedding structured data (for machines) within unstructured data (for humans). Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 07:55, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

It's also helpful, on Wikidata or here, that the information you add be informative. In your recent reverted edit to factorial (which I might note is a Good Article, where extra care is warranted) you decided that the most useful things for the readers to see are (1) a big blank square of nothing, helpfully marked with axes, oh and maybe if you're squinting you might notice that there are four tiny dots in it somewhere, (2) a formula using a heavily technical piece of mathematical notation for products that I had carefully and deliberately avoided using in the lead, in getting this to Good Article status, because one of the Good Article criteria is that articles should be to the extent possible readable to a broad audience, and (3) a description of one of the many areas of application of this topic, without listing any of the others, misinforming readers that this is the only application. Why do you think these choices were improvements to the article? —David Eppstein (talk) 08:05, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

@David Eppstein Ok, but the current policy for the article factorial is not appropriate for semantic web goals. But I have an idea, we can make all of Infobox totally hidden for readers of factorial article at first glance, but we add a texted button for "Show light infobox" and "Show full infobox". Its implementation is very simple. We should write a "div" tag element that its "display style" is "hidden", and when the reader clicks on the text "show light infobox" or "show full infobox", he may display light or full infoboxes. Do you agree? Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 08:30, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

How many times are "semantic web goals" mentioned at WP:5P? Can you see mentions on any policy pages? The idea of hiding content to be revealed on a click has been dismissed (apart from some cumbersome navboxes that are a side issue for articles). Johnuniq (talk) 09:07, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

@Johnuniq It does not exists at WP:5P, but Tim Berners Lee strictly mentioned that apply these ideas to the WWW gradually. Implementation of semantic web is not only for Wikipedia, but all WWW web pages should implement that ideas in the future and one of the sites and pages that should follow semantic web goals mentioned by Berners Lee is Wikipedia and its articles.

It is not an idea of WP:5P, but it is an idea of total WWW, which has much more wider domain than Wikipedia. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 09:16, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

If the current policy for the article factorial is not appropriate for semantic web goals, then there's something wrong with the semantic web goals, not with the article factorial. XOR'easter (talk) 14:15, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

@XOR'easter What!

there's something wrong with the semantic web goals

See, in the simplest words, goal of semantic web is to make the current World Wide Web "machine readable". What is wrong with this goal? I.e., a robot fully understands factorial and can answer queries, and a human easily asks a question from that robot and robot answers. Let me give an example, you want to answer this question:

Is factorial function defined for -1? Yes or no

current "non-semantic web" cannot answer this query automatically. But in semantic web we can easily say "No is not defined". This is done via comparing "structured data for domain" of factorial function (that exists in the infobox of article) and comparing that with "-1" value. Note that auto-answering this query is nearly impossible in "non-semantic web". Is that a bad goal? Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 14:34, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

I'm sure some people would say that making the web "machine readable" is just the next phase of surveillance capitalism... Good or bad, it's entirely orthogonal to what this project is trying to accomplish. And blundering towards that goal by making articles worse for humans is definitely bad. XOR'easter (talk) 15:10, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

@XOR'easter

making articles worse for humans is definitely bad.

I definitely say that these goals is not worst for humans. A normal human opens a Wikipedia article to answer a specific question is his mind. For example:

1. Suppose I do not know factorial at all, and want to know what is factorial? What questions you should answer to understand factorial? The correct data is in Infobox.
2. I know factorial but I don't know it's correct domain: related data is in Infobox.
3. I know something about factorial function, but I want to know "Is factorial a continuous function or a discrete function?"

The third question above is only answered via a query in semantic web. This is done via reading meaning of continuous function in a related article and comparing the result with the domain. You wrote:

it's entirely orthogonal to what this project is trying to accomplish.

Is answering the third question an "orthogonal goal"!!! I definitely say no, «««it must be implemented»»», as Tim Berners Lee strictly says we must implement that. See, that is a duty of our ethnic youth group in the year 2022 for who lives in next generation of people. Answering these questions (by machines) is very important. Very very important!! Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 15:37, 5 April 2022 (UTC)