On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 3:10 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkald...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > Personally, I think the focus of this discussion on infoboxes is > short-sighted. My personal hope is that Wikidata will actually allow the > Wikipedias to use fewer infoboxes (and when they are used, for them to be > much smaller). This may sound counter-intuitive, but let me explain... > > <opinionated rant> > Right now, English Wikipedia suffers from a continually growing plague of > infobox cruft. Most articles on Wikipedia now look more like Pokemon cards > than Encyclopedia articles. Compare: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wollstonecraft > 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. In fact they actually detract from that goal. The > infobox for George Washington leads me to believe that he had equal > allegiance to Britain and the U.S., that he was a Deist Episcopal (which is > quite misleading in its simplicity), and that his role as President of the > United States was just as important as his role as Delegate to the Second > Continental Congress from Virginia. Not to mention the fact that it's nearly > 3 pages long! Imagine an infobox like that sitting in > http://af.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington. > > If we had a repository where people could put all the fact-cruft that they > want, they would probably be less tempted to spam the infoboxes with it. And > maybe at some point we could even replace infoboxes with a "Data tab" or > something similar that gave a full interface to the Wikidata data, but > without having it dominate the Wikipedia article (as infoboxes do). I > imagine that eventually the Wikidata content on many subjects will exceed > the Wikipedia content. > > So my personal hope is that Wikidata will eventually allow us to think > outside the infobox. Heh, I think I'll make that my new slogan: "Think > outside the infobox!" Or maybe "Death to infoboxes! Long live Wikidata!" :) > </opinionated rant> > > Disclaimer: I'm not directly involved with the Wikidata project, just an > interested onlooker.
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