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Revision as of 01:43, 10 March 2006 by Kirill Lokshin (talk | contribs) (Created new proposal)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff) | The following is a proposed Misplaced Pages policy, guideline, or process. The proposal may still be in development, under discussion, or in the process of gathering consensus for adoption. |
- Please edit this proposal!
Infobox templates are a broad group of templates commonly used at the top of an article to present certain summary or overview information about the topic. In theory, the fields in an infobox should be consistent across a set of related articles; in practice, however, this is rarely the case, for a number of reasons. When this occurs, infoboxes should be designed to dynamically adapt themselves to the absence or presence of particular fields.
Causes of inconsistency
A number of factors can cause inconsistency in summary information between articles in a set:
- Historical incompleteness
- Certain desired infomation may simply have been lost over time. For example, an infobox describing a modern bank may provide certain financial information that would be unavailable for a medieval one.
- Hierarchical inconsistency
- Infoboxes that indicate hierachical relationships may have subtly different requirements depending on where in the hierarchy the subject of the article is located. For example, an infobox for corporations will be different between an article describing a parent company and indicating its subsidiaries and an article describing a subsidiary and indicating its parent.
- Feature inconsistency
- Items within a single set may have optional features that would commonly be listed in an infobox. For example, an infobox for an article about a university may include a motto; but not all universities have them.
Why dynamic templates?
While there are several alternatives to dynamic infoboxes, such as using multiple (forked) templates or leaving fields blank, they should be avoided, for a number of reasons:
- Readers greatly outnumber editors
- The most important group to consider are the casual readers of Misplaced Pages, who will never do any significant editing. Infobox templates that contain many blank fields, question marks, or "Unknown"s present an unprofessional appearance, diminishing our reputation as a high-quality encyclopedia.
- Article editors greatly outnumber template editors
- The average editor will merely use templates without making changes to them. To make things easier for them, we should aim to minimize the number of different templates they must be familiar with; creating multiple forks of templates is therefore undesirable.
Implementations
- Conditional templates
- A variety of methods for selectively hiding particular content (such as table rows) within a template, including {{qif}}, Weeble code, and several variations of the hiddenStructure CSS class.
- Name-resolved meta-templates
- Several sub-templates (or even independent templates) with a common name prefix. They are included in an infobox based on the value of a particular parameter, which acts as the name suffix. For example, we create
{{Infobox Ship/Military}}and{{Infobox Ship/Civilian}}and use{{Infobox Ship/{{{type}}}}}. Using|type=Militaryin an article causes{{Infobox Ship/Military}}to be used.