On 7/11/12 8:34 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:
On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 2:10 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkald...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
The problem with infoboxes is that they are inherently unencyclopedic.
Infoboxes are for viewing data, not for giving a nuanced and comprehensive
overview of a subject.
Don't underestimate how much readers love infoboxes. We did a mobile
UX test a while ago, and it turned out that infoboxes were
accidentally broken on mobile at that specific time. Some testers
pointed this out quickly as a bug, along the lines of "Where's the
little table which gives you all the useful info at a glance". It's
not an accident that Google has integrated infobox-style information
into search results. Highly scannable info can be of great value to
readers.
So I'm not sure moving all this stuff outside of the article is ever a
good idea. But I agree there's a fair bit of cruft there as well, and
Wikidata could help separate key at-a-glance facts from details.
One approach might be to allow per-article customization of which facts
are displayed in the article as quick facts in a box, and encourage that
to be a relatively small number.
The basic problem imo is that infoboxes tend to include the superset of
all information that *could* be useful fact-at-a-glance entry for *any*
article in a certain area. A slot is added when it makes sense for
Article X to display it, but once that slot exists, editors feel they
should feel it in for all other articles using the template too, so
every article gets every slot filled in, whether it's particularly
important information for that article's topic or not.
There's something to be said for uniformity of the infobox formatting,
but I think some deviation from uniformity may help make many of them
more readable.
-Mark
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