Template talk:Infobox tea

Origin
Does that mean "place where it was first brewed", "places where it is produced a lot today" or "places where it is consumed a lot today"? It must be next to impossible to verify where some tea was "invented", so I hope it is one of the other two. Wikipeditor 16:52, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

time and temperature
Should we not mention practical information such as infusion time, optimal water temperature, number of possible infusions, etc. ? Rama 19:19, 10 July 2007 (UTC)


 * I fixed the conditional infusion info, it looks ok but could use some polish by an infobox pro. Are there any articles actually using these fields?  I had to mock up some info just to test it.  Ah well...  --Jmeden2000 15:19, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Gyokuro was using these fields and the current version of this template was leaking markup onto the page when those fields were used (the temperature field in particular appears to be the culprit). I've removed those fields from use in that article, but the problem can be seen in this previous version.  --Dfred (talk) 18:52, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Error causing blank lines
I'm not a template expert so can say nothing about the details, but several blank lines appear at the top of the Tieguanyin page (version 03:41, 30 August 2008 Heroeswithmetaphors). If I comment out in the Infobox information the line " Tea_temperature          = 85°C |" the blank lines go away. Which implies an error in this Infobox which I don't have the knowledge to repair. (If you display the Tieguanyin page and the error is not blatantly obvious, it'll have been fixed). [Added Feb 09: problem has now been solved.] Pol098 (talk) 14:55, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Issues with this template
Several of the parameters on this template seem pretty ambiguous to me. First, as the decade-old section at the top of this page points out, "Tea_origin" doesn't make clear whether it's where the tea was invented, or where it is presently manufactured, and the help text doesn't help clarify things. "Tea_color" might refer to the color of the leaves or the liquor -- note that for example in the West, teas are generally categorized by the color of the leaves, whereas the tradition in China is to categorize them by the color of the liquor, hence what are "black" teas in the West are "red" teas in China. It might be useful to have two separate parameters since in some cases the leaves and liquor are roughly similar in color (e.g. Japanese green teas) while in other cases they can be quite different.

"Tea_infusion", "Tea_temperature", "Tea_time", "Tea_infusion_number", "Tea_quantity", and "Tea_hour" all seem essentially useless to me. Depending on the method of preparation, most teas can be brewed with a range of temperatures, times, and number of infusions, to produce different flavor profiles or a darker/lighter result. Besides, WP:NOTHOWTO and all that. None of these parameters give you much real information about the tea itself, which is ostensibly the subject of the infobox. They're mostly unused anyway, and I doubt you could really get consensus on the right values for any particular tea.

"Tea_hour" is especially strange. It's not even remotely related to any characteristic of the tea and is defined entirely by convention -- which will vary from culture to culture of course. This parameter seems to be infrequently used, if ever, and I'd recommend just getting rid of it.

Meanwhile, I think a few additional optional parameters could be useful, since they're often the defining characteristics of the tea:
 * The form(s) the tea comes in, i.e. loose leaf, brick, powder, teabags
 * The part of the plant that is plucked, i.e. bud, leaf and bud, two leaves and bud, single mature leaf, etc.
 * Method of processing: steamed, pan-fired, oven-fired, smoked, CTC, etc.
 * Leaf shape: flattened like Longjing tea, rolled into needles like Sencha, compressed into balls like Tieguanyin, etc.
 * Harvest time(s) during the year
 * Cultivar/varietal used -- some teas exclusively use a particular type, or are even clones, whereas others use various different ones

In contrast to many of the existing parameters to this infobox, the suggested additions are actually objective, and consensus can be arrived at for the right values because they're not matters of opinion.

Anyway, I don't know a thing about writing infobox templates so I'm not the guy to make these changes, but if any of these suggestions sounds worthwhile to somebody, I'd very much appreciate if they could be implemented. -- diff (talk) 04:33, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Parameters removed
Since nobody replied to my previous comments, I just went ahead and made some of the changes I suggested. Tea_hour, Tea_infusion, Tea_infusion_number, and Tea_quantity have been removed. Any templates that used them (very few as a matter of fact) have been updated to stop doing so. Hope this doesn't break anything. -- diff (talk) 01:32, 18 August 2017 (UTC)