Gwern Branwen wrote: > On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 8:09 AM, Andrew Gray wrote: > >> On another note, wow. I hadn't realised how much stuff was in our >> infoboxes. The five lines of government I can understand, the two GDPs >> ditto, but do we really need a quick-reference for "proportion of area >> which is water", the Gini coefficient, or the side of the road it >> uses? >> -- >> - Andrew Gray >> > All of those are pretty interesting things - what side of the road > tells you both historical information, and also is terribly practical > if you're there*; Gini coefficient is an excellent concise indicator > of economic & political development; and water-proportion affects > recreation, economic focuses, and historical course. Given the minimal > space they take up and their subordinate position, I don't see much > ground for complaining. > > * Although one certainly hopes that anyone driving in a particular > country will not need Wikipedia to tell them something like this! > > It is easy to argue that any specific factoid is significant about the subject, and that it should thus be included in an infobox, but the present issue is a broader one about how many factoids can an infobox contain without degradation of its usefulness. The primary infobox for a subject needs to be limited to the most important information which the average reader is most likely to seek, and which he can find in a predictable place. I don't have much basis to make a specific recommendation about how many factoids a primary box should contain, but a good rule of thumb might be: If you need to scroll to see it all, it's probably too long.
That said, nothing in this prevents separate secondary infoboxes. If it is agreed that per capita GNP for a country belongs in its primary infobox, nothing prevents having a secondary box containing a broader selection of economic indicators. Ec _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
