Template talk:Infobox pseudoscience

This infobox template is intended for use with WikiProject Pseudoscience. Please check Wikipedia Talk:WikiProject Pseudoscience before making changes. --Christopher Thomas 07:03, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Formatting peculiarities
I've rolled back some of the changes that were recently made to the template. I appreciate the effort made; it just turns out that there are a few quirks of how tables seem to work in Wikipedia that required them. Specifically: The efforts to improve the template were definitely appreciated, however! --Christopher Thomas 20:33, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
 * The disciplines/topics, original proponents/origprop, and current proponents/currentprop fields are intended to hold lists. If there isn't a newline before the substituted text, the first element of the list isn't parsed properly. This makes single, non-bulletted entries look slightly uglier, due to vertical displacement; better solutions would be welcome.
 * Similarly, if there isn't a "vertical-align:top" style hint, then in some browsers (mine, for one), a list with more than one entry will cause the title of the field to be in the middle of the cell, instead of aligned with the top of the list.
 * I feel that having the title in larger text is important, as people will read the large text first. I've added this back in without disturbing the background text field.


 * No problem at all. However, I don't get your first item above. It looks like these should contain bulleted lists, but when I browse through the pages using this template, I don't see any boxes which contain bulleted lists. Is this a function of my browser (Safari), or is nobody using the template correctly? I had removed the bullets from Paleocontact theory and it looks much better without them... except that the top-alignment means the columns don't align properly. Epastore 01:42, 4 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Every box linked appears to use bullets, with the exception of Paleocontact theory. Crop circle also uses a one-line list to hold multiple affected topic designations, but this looks like it was accidental rather than deliberate. I think that using a comma-delimited list makes the list less readable, but I'm open to discussion. I'll post a note about this on the Physics and Pseudoscience pages to get more opinions. I can see arguments for and against both versions. --Christopher Thomas 04:52, 4 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Update: Informal poll is here. --Christopher Thomas 06:17, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Update: I've balanced newlines in the rows that have them, so things look good either way and format is a non-issue. I'm embarrassed that it took me several days to think of this. --Christopher Thomas 05:17, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Test renderings
These are test instances of the infobox designed to assess rendering under varying conditions. Any revised version of the infobox should be checked to make sure it still looks good for all test cases. New cases may be added as new pathological situations are identified. Please don't add comments to this section (instead, put it in a new thread heading above). --Christopher Thomas 20:42, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Nominated for deletion
This template seems to repeatedly cause controversy. I figure that the best means to deal with that would be to place it up for deletion, using the common objections: Template:Infobox Pseudoscience has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for Deletion page. Thank you. - LinaMishima (talk) 21:36, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Improving the infobox
How can the infobox be improved, so as to counter the objections of its critics? Most significantly, some means to address the NPOV might be a good idea. How about adding a required "Current research" or similarly named section? Or "Claims to science title" (which is what needs to be countered for something to be a pseudoscience)? LinaMishima (talk) 23:03, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
 * That is a good idea, but since the title remains "pseudoscience" we should be careful to use it per WP:PSCI (see my comments below). We could of course create a new series box and call it "controversial science", but in general I prefer lists and categories to series boxes, since the latter screw up formatting... as can be seen from what this one does to the subsection "edit" buttons, at least in Firefox.  Cf. WP:CLS.

When to use it
Since this series box applies the label "pseudoscience" without qualification, we should be careful to use it strictly according to WP:PSCI criteria for category:pseudoscience, i.e., only
 * tiny-minority absurdities like Flat Earth Society
 * topics like intelligent design that are widely (and attributably, cf. List of scientific societies rejecting intelligent design) considered pseudoscience by scientific consensus.

Per WP:RS, attributing sci consensus requires a particular type of source, in this case a statement from a mainstream scientific body such as an Academy of Sciences. We can't rely on statements from an individual scientists or signatories to a petition, since these are self-selected and don't establish what the consensus view is. There is nothing preventing using statements from individual RS's in articles, but they aren't sufficient for categorizing or using series boxes. --Jim Butler (t) 07:26, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
 * From my experience, however, most people know the above. The issue lies entirely with deciding when there is clear scientific consensus, and that is what makes things so hard LinaMishima (talk) 12:23, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Name field
...is sort of redundant isn't it? On all the transclusions I looked at, editors the name of the article in the "name" field. Presumably a reader will already know what article they're reading... it's in big bold letters at the top of the article : ) I'm going to remove the field unless there's any objections. -- Nealparr  (talk to me) 15:49, 7 May 2008 (UTC)


 * I was just about to write a new comment that a name field is needed when I saw this section... Without the field, the box seems disconnected to me. And it appears at first glance to be about "Pseudoscientific concepts" in general, not about one in particular, especially when the box is placed further down in an article. Compare to Alternative medical systems, for instance. That box has a categorical title, but it's a list/index/guide to such systems, not a box about a specific system in that category. In the same way, when I see a box labeled only "Pseudoscientific concepts", I'm expecting a navbox/guide. If the name field is made an optional field, I don't see why it would harm anything. It might seem less redundant if it were rendered as: " as a pseudoscientific concept", or something similar. Fru1tbat (talk) 21:18, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

added documentation page
I added a documentation page at Template:Infobox_Pseudoscience/doc. It's automatically added by the "Documentation" template that I added. Notice the "noinclude" tags to prevent the documentation page from being added to all the pages that use the template --Enric Naval (talk) 08:49, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

title change

 * I changed the title to "Pseudoscientific Theories", per comment on RfC . --Enric Naval (talk) 14:50, 8 May 2008 (UTC)


 * "Theories" isn't correct. See my reply at the RfC -- Nealparr  (talk to me) 16:39, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Image field
I added an image field to the top of the infobox. It doesn't show up if no image is specified, so the appearance of the infobox won't have changed on the pages it's transcluded in. To see an example of it in use see Brain Gym. --Hugh Charles Parker (talk - contribs) 16:18, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Deletion is being discussed
Please see  Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 20:06, 29 June 2011 (UTC)


 * This appears to be a dispute between you and other editors about whether the template should be used on a specific set of pages, not a deletion discussion. This template has already been discussed at TfD, twice, per the notices at the top of this page. --Christopher Thomas (talk) 21:24, 29 June 2011 (UTC)