Infobox Returns (Apr 12-13)

Ouch! I've been following this discussion and wondering whether and how to respond. I would be one editor who is "guilty" of adding templates to talk pages, including "needs infobox". As a result of a very civil discussion with Antandrus , on Talk:Claudio Monteverdi, I learned the reasons why those who edit the articles about classical composers prefer not to have infoboxes, and have therefore ceased the practice of using the "needs infobox" parameter on Composers articles.

Moreschi, your reference to "Mr. Cretin" above (in my case it would be "Ms. Cretin"), is not very pleasant. Part of the process of Wikipedia is that one does things that one thinks is beneficial, and then one's behavior is refined by interactions with others, where people explain why they have opinions or preferences about doing things different ways. In the case of my adding the "needs infobox parameter" to the Claudio Monteverdi article, the next editor's response was merely to change the parameter to "No", with no attempt to "educate" me as to why - this could have been done via a note on my talk page; a note on the talk page of the article; even a comment in the edit summary. After seeing that change, I tried looking for documentation of a "soft consensus" in a centralized location, and couldn't find one, and therefore needed to solicit an explanation, in order to understand why my edit was changed. So, I'm glad that this discussion has been started here. But, I'd ask you to consider that any discussion on Wikipedia has a "public audience" and to be respectful of those coming from a different angle.

Many of you have been stating very strongly the reasons why you don't like infoboxes on articles about Composers. I would suggest, now, changing the direction of the discussion to focus on positive actions, rather than rants that may offend those who have (however mistakenly) recommended infoboxes in the past. How might you interact positively with WikiProject Biography to accomplish what you'd like to happen? Thanks in advance for your willingness to talk things over in a positive way, Lini 12:37, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Lini, I suspect that was me, and I apologise that you felt you needed an explanation and didn't get one. I assumed that you were going through tagging scores of articles, and wouldn't notice or care if the parameters on one were changed. Whenever I have tried to explain why a biography box was detrimental for a specific composer article, people have insisted that I should get higher level consensus. Say, on the Composers Wikiproject. I don't think we should need a consensus of all of WikiProject Biography in order to keep infoboxes off of composer articles, although if we get consensus (and it looks like we will as long as those involved in the discussion are those who edit composer biographies) we should probably let them know. Although I think infoboxes for people are generally detrimental, there are probably groups who strongly disagree with me, and whose subject areas work better within the confines of infoboxes. Mak (talk) 14:47, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

My apologies for being a complete jackass: that wasn't polite or civil, and I apologise. In fact, it was very, very stupid. I wasn't really so annoyed with the composer ones, which are borderline cases as I was in cases where an infobox would take up more room and go on for longer in the viewing window than the actual article does. I'll talk to WP:BIOGRAPHY over this - politely. Again, I apologise for being a dick. Sorry. Cheers, Moreschi ^{Want some help? Ask!} 13:33, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Moreschi, thank you for the apology and the nice note on my talk page; I kinda thought that your remarks were more along the lines of "not thinking the impact all the way through" than deliberately trying to offend anyone. Thanks for taking the time to "make it right". Cheers, Lini 19:15, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

A couple of side-notes:

• While pottering around adding things like Template:Verdi operas to opera articles, I've occasionally run into infoboxes on composer pages that aren't the ones under discussion here, for example Template:italianmusic, which appears, for example, in the articles on Domenico Cimarosa, Francesco Cilea and Franco Donatoni. And I see that someone has completely unnecessarily added the Verdi operas template to the Giuseppe Verdi article, notwithstanding that this more-or-less duplicates the list of operas in the article, and the image at the top of the infobox duplicates the one already in the article. It looks as if some sort of territorial agreement (or summit conference) among projects might be useful - specifically, I suppose, where the activities of the Biography people overlap other projects. I dunno where the Music of Italy one comes from.
• If anyone wants to look at discussion similar to the above, try the Shakespeare talk page where a discussion about "influences" in the infobox includes discussion of their general utility.

Add my vote to the biography-infoboxes-for-composers-are-a-waste-of-space camp. --GuillaumeTell 13:55, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

(General comment) Please bear in mind that some infoboxes are being used to contain structured meta data, to assist parsing by 'bots, and this kind of use is likely to increase the future, not least with the addition of microformats such as hCard. If the current infobox(es) are not notable, then I think we'd do better to replace or improve, rather then avoid, them. Andy Mabbett 15:04, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Not notable? Huh? I think if you want editors to use infoboxes as metadata catch-alls, you should make them a lot more flexible. We need to find a much more robust way to gather metadata, this is clearly not working for composers. Mak (talk) 15:27, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

s/notable/suitable - my typo. Where does this "you" come from? I thought this was supposed to be a collaboration? Andy Mabbett 16:04, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Don't get me started on bots...We're an encylopaedia; our primary aim should be to provide accurate information; anything that hinders that (such as these boxes) should go. --Folantin 15:34, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

You appear to have misread or not read, my comment - if they "hinder" that aim then they should be improved until they do not. Good infoboxes help that aim. Andy Mabbett 16:04, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Why not use the "persondata" template to collect metadata? That's what it's for. The infoboxes on composers do more harm than good, as discussed above, and you can collect good metadata using something like "persondata" which is invisible. Antandrus (talk) 16:07, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Include Infoboxes – I am actually one of the undesirable people that add infoboxes to articles. However, on pages where there is a dispute over the inclusion of an infobox, I refrain from adding one but might make a comment on the article's talk page. I actually refrained from adding an infobox to the Beethoven page as the well-sized image looked quite nice there before, and saw the discussion from September 2006 on the Talk page. As for the instruments thing, it's supposed to be for well-known specific instruments played by a musical performer. (It was added to accomodate famous guitars for incorporating the guitarist infobox into the musical artist infobox.) It doesn't make sense for Beethoven but perhaps it does for Yo-Yo Ma and his Stradivarious Cello. I recently asked for a vote on the Chopin talk page on whether to include an infobox. I understand that the infobox does not illustrate the nuances of certain facts about a person's life. However, there is nothing in the musical artist infobox that explicitly states a person's nationality. It states their date and place of birth, date and place of death, and optionally their origin if it is different from their place of birth. Their origin is explained as where they started their musical career or the notable part of it. Notes can be added to birthplace or date, just as in the body of an article, where an interested party can look to find additional information. If no date is known, one can simply put the year, decade, or century with circa. If editors have a problem with a listed genre, change it or discuss it on the talk page. Editors that have a great deal of knowledge about a subject may find infoboxes simplistic, redundant, and rude. However, a student with little or no knowledge about a subject can use the infobox to quickly identify the subject by context. This is the greatest use of an infobox for the broad audience of wikipedia. For this reason, I hope that infoboxes can be incorporated into these articles, with every attempt to make the information contained within them as accurate as possible. - cgilbert^{(talk|contribs)} 18:50, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Well, in the case of Beethoven, for instance, they could get the same information (only more accurate) from the first two sentences of the article (if the places of birth and death were put there). The introductory sections to each article are supposed to provide an overview of the subject anyway - and they are able to do this in a far more flexible and intelligent manner than the infoboxes. --Folantin 19:17, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

I think perhaps you are missing some of our objections to infoboxes, or perhaps they are not problems for you. The point on Beethoven is not that I don't understand what the appropriate place for a performer's instruments would be, but that is entirely inappropriate for Beethoven's article to have it as one of the first things. As for giving a range or decade for his birthday, we know a definite fact about his birth - his date of baptism. It seems silly to give a wishy-washy date for his birthday when we can give his exact date of baptism. But this is not really the point - it is that infoboxes have a tendency to be inaccurate, inappropriate, and inflexible. The Beethoven article is just a particularly egregious example. If the regular editors could figure out how to make it good without hours of research into strange codes, they would. These infoboxes are not very wiki. The use of flags for countries which did not exist at the time the person lived, in Josquin for example, is just yet another example of a near-pathological need for consistency to the detriment of accuracy.

Also, this discussion is not about all infoboxes. It is just about Biography infoboxes on composer articles. Mak (talk) 19:56, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Except that the infobox on the Beethoven page is not a Biography infobox but Template:Infobox musical artist, which has been slapped on a lot of composers' pages when it's really intended for performers (such as Alexis Korner, Britney Spears, Doris Day, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Throbbing Gristle - need I go on?) --GuillaumeTell 21:01, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

The basis for it is the Biography infobox. That there are a gazillion versions of almost-identicle infoboxes for biographies is an argument for why they are not very useful, to me. It makes it difficult for bots to parse them anyway, and highlights their inflexibility. My point with the above comment is that we are not trying to abolish them for those who feel strongly that Britney Spears needs an infobox, and we are not trying to get rid of all informative templates, but that we are only trying to get a consensus about the "potted biographies", as Kleinzach calls them. Mak (talk) 21:06, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Exactly. It's not a problem, as far as I am concerned anyway, if people want to have infoboxes on popular performers, or even "classical" performers. Perlman has a verifiable birthdate, lives in countries, owns a significant violin, and plays it regularly. But Josquin?? I wouldn't want someone just reading about this magnificent musician for the first time to think he was born in Austria, died in France, and considered his occupation to be composer. All three are not only misleading, they are demonstrably false. Antandrus (talk) 00:57, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Infobox, the Revenge (Apr 16-17)

I've just raised this issue with the Arts Project to se how other projects feel about it, see Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Arts#Biographical_infoboxes.2C_Biography_Project_banners_and_bots. Any other news? - Kleinzach 00:12, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

I agree with the thoughts of those that oppose badly thought-out infoboxes (sometimes it is possible for an infobox to be well designed), and also those who oppose flags in infoboxes. I once started and advertised a centralized discussion on use of flag templates, but that ran out of steam. Doing one for infoboxes would take even more effort, but is urgently needed. Two reasons - (1) I read somewhere, but can't find the reference, that Google are trying to parse our infoboxes!! (2) We should really be using Wikipedia:Persondata to gather biographical meta-data for database-type applications. Finally, database concerns should be secondary to the need to produce a well-references and well-written encyclopedia article. Carcharoth 12:56, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

There are some interesting discussions at Wikipedia talk:Persondata as well. Carcharoth 13:01, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Probably pointless dissent At the risk of spitting into the wind, I have to disagree with much of the above. I think some of the opposition is driven by the aesthetic concerns of experts/initiates, rather than strategic concerns wrt serving the general reader.

Infoboxes in general have a distinctly USA Today feel that naturally grates on us longhairs, inducing feelings akin to a passionate oenophile presented with a white wine spritzer. [I count myself as much a longhair musicgeek as any here--just look at the freakin username I took!] But while even the initiate can learn lots from the best WP articles, I don't think that's the only, or even necessarily the primary, goal of developing these articles. Ideally, while simultaneously affording a respectable scholarly overview, I think a perfect article should also provide a friendly intro to the most ignorant of the uninitiated. (Note: ignorant, not stupid.) It's the same reason we wikilink the most basic concepts (even music itself!). Try to imagine the reader who comes to the article wondering just who, or what, a Goss-kwynn is. He looks at the box, sees that he's the guy in the funny hat in the woodcut, & that he lived in Europe in the 1500's & wrote music. Maybe that's enough for him, or that's all he has time for today. He goes away seconds later (assuming a decent infobox) less ignorant than before. What's wrong with that?

Yes, infoboxes often duplicate the info in a good lead section. But take the common parallel of a good (broadsheet) newspaper article. Compare the infobox with the headline, the lead section with the lede, or front page, text, and the stuff after the TOC (the article proper) with the meat of the news article, "after the jump". News headlines and ledes almost always duplicate information. That doesn't mean they serve the same purpose. And leads aren't always much better. I took a look at Beethoven the other day after reading complaints here. I immediately edited the infobox to cut the occupation "conductor." But (as I said on the talk page) I had to edit the lead too--in fact the lead was worse. IIRC the phrase was "...he was also a celebrated pianist and conductor," which is so wrong my brain hurts. I just looked at Chopin (the top of which is really very anti WP:STYLE). I found myself really wanting an infobox so that I could quickly remind myself what his dates were or just how young he died, without digging through the 25 versions of his name (like it or not his name in common Anglophone usage is precisely Frederic Chopin; one can always just delete the "birthname" parameter).

To my eye the current iterations of the Josquin and Beethoven infoboxes are net pluses. It doesn't seem to have been that impossible to fix the problems, like just deleting the anachronistic flags. (I do think minimalism is good infobox philosophy.) Maybe Josquin didn't "think of himself" as a composer, but we certainly do; if he were just a great Papal chorister I dare say he wouldn't be on WP.

Finally on the technical editing issues Mak brought up way up top, as a pretty new editor (c. 40 days), I really haven't had much problem working with {{Infobox musical artist}}. Once you get a hold of the basic idea of a template (which any serious editor is gonna have to do anyway) it's not all that hard to work with. Actually, with it's named parameters and throrough "doc" page, it's one of the easier templates I've worked with so far. No it's not ideal for composers, but I think decent workarounds are possible and have already been achieved in some places. Terminology is a problem, but I think we have to meet the general public halfway in places--the lay listener may hear stylistic differences between Beethoven's 1st piano sonata and the 32nd, but she is almost certainly going to identify both as the "classical" genre. Has anyone tried bringing up modifications/additional parameters (say "Stylistic period=...") w/ the template's creators or WPMusicians? or just creating a fork? (...he asked, confident that his own technical incompetence would absolve him of actual responsibility...)

Apologies as usual for verbosity. There's alot up there to respond to...—Turangalila ^talk 15:16, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Thank you Turangalila for your support and thorough explanation of the use of infoboxes. You explained the issue much better than I have been able to do. I've also noticed the Chopin page in particular for its stance against the inclusion of an infobox, and the awkward layout at the top of the page. I've made comments on the Chopin talk page in relation to the use of an infobox and to the position of the table of contents. I hope that the users who are against using infoboxes can read Turangalila's comments above and come away with a new appreciation for the value that they provide to uninformed and casual users of Wikipedia. - cgilbert^{(talk|contribs)} 22:22, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

I'd like to add support for the viewpoint that Turangalila expressed, that it is OK that the content of infoboxes is redundant (they are supposed to be redundant), and that, in spite of the difficulty of presenting a nuanced view of the information in the very brief summary required, they are a net plus, when recognized as targeting "the most ignorant of uninitiated" readers (no disparagement intended by that terminology), who is just taking a quick look at the page. Turangalila, you did a good job of expressing eloquently, thoughts on infoboxes that I'd been trying to grapple with the day that I first read this discussion. However, I will also restate, for consistency with previous statements I've made, that although I agree that a decently designed and utilized infobox is a net plus to an article in general, that does not mean that I think a group of articles should be required to have them if the consensus of editors who are most interested in the articles is against having them. Thanks, Lini 02:18, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

I don't think anybody is against infoboxes per se. We certainly have used them on the Opera Project - but they should be fit for purpose. --Kleinzach 02:34, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Talk:Ludwig van Beethoven now has a To do list which states Wikify: On IE the Birth name appear as John Winston Lennon. The article has ben listed as a current candidate for the Article Creation and Improvement Drive. I am going to remove the infobox and ask for a vote, as we have had on the Chopin page. Everyone is welcome to express any opinion but please do us the basic courtesy of actually reading the article and thinking before you decide. - Kleinzach 23:04, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

BTW I got rid of the John Lennon business on LvB talk, which AFAICT was 4-month old vandalism noone had noticed. Is a possible "article improvement drive" somehow a problem as well? —Turangalila ^talk 02:05, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

After asking for a vote on the Talk:Ludwig van Beethoven infobox, the article has been automatically relisted on Category:Musicians work group articles needing infoboxes. - Kleinzach 00:24, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

I tried this, but doubt it will stick for long. As above, I think we're better without infoboxes on non-current composers, but it's not the end of the world if I'm overruled. Cheers, Antandrus (talk) 00:28, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

FWIW I agree that an automatic re-listing or parameter-changing is pretty bizarre...are you sure that wasn't some overzealous pro-infobox editor? Anyway, I tried some further "trimming" on the LvB talk page wrt birthday etc. Like I said, I'm all in favor of minimizing infobox content where any controversy etc applies, but if their net contribution to the page can be rendered zero or greater, I think inclusionism is the right attitude...—Turangalila ^talk 01:33, 17 April 2007 (UTC)