Template talk:Infobox university/Archive 17

Carnegie Classification
As someone who has worked in higher ed for nearly a decade and has worked to create new and review current institutional academic policies for compliance within and against accreditation standards, I can attest to how important Carnegie Classifications are to a post secondary institution. It would be best if Carnegie Classifications were included within the university infobox template. I’m fairly new to the wikipedia coding world and wanted to reach out to see how the coding of a new category in the infobox:university template would work.

I’ve gotten so far as this:

But, I know there’s a lot more to it. The “Carnegie Classifications” category should be linked to the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education page (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Classification_of_Institutions_of_Higher_Education) and the classifications would come from the page’s ==Basic classifications== section.

How is this done?! TIA! rolltide689 02:53, 18 December 2020 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rolltide689 (talk • contribs)
 * Hmm, interesting thought! The Carnegie classification definitely always belongs in the article somewhere. For the infobox, my main concern is that it might duplicate type. I'm curious to hear what others think. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 06:04, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
 * I think we need to have a broader discussion of "type" at least for U.S. institutions. For example, many articles just have an one or more adjectives (e.g., "Private liberal arts" or "Public land-grant research") without the critical final noun (e.g., "college" or "university"). I've been changing this as I see it but not in a systematic way for all relevant articles (I'm working primarily on the space-grant institutions right now and making this change while I'm also editing the infobox for that). Additionally, right now we usually only specify "for-profit" institutions with the logic being that the vast majority of institutions are non-profit so we can safely omit it for those institutions. I still like and agree with that logic but more importantly we're out-of-step with how the major classification systems and sources (e.g., IPEDS, Carnegie Classification) do this as they all make the non-profit status of all private institutions explicit.
 * I'm not entirely sure if even the Basic Classification belongs in the infobox as many of the categories are not familiar to readers. I think we discussed this a few years ago and I was supposed to draft some ideas for a separate template with all of the Carnegie Classifications that we could try out in some articles. I don't think I followed through on that but it still sounds like a good idea.
 * I also have some ideas for additional parameters (e.g., accreditation, system) but I won't hijack this discussion. ElKevbo (talk) 06:23, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

Where to note years
At Infobox organization, information that changes annually, such as endowment and staff, has accompanying endowment_year etc., which displays as a non-bolded parenthetical in the labels column. For universities, I've often seen this done manually, as at University of Maryland, College Park. A third option would be to encourage placing As of YYYY inside the beginning of the reference for each statistic. A fourth option would be to just rely on people seeing the date that's in the reference normally. All of these have downsides: putting it in the labels column lengthens the infobox by making it go onto a second line, putting it in the data column makes it hard to sufficiently de-emphasize (since that column is already unbolded and we can't make it much smaller without going against MOS:SMALL), and putting it inside the reference requires people to check it (and, if it's at the start, duplicates the date parameter of the reference). What is the best solution here? Courtesy pinging, as I've seen you updating endowments and stuff like that. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 10:16, 21 December 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm not seeing "endowment year" as a parameter for this template. Am I missing it or looking in the wrong place?
 * I recommend posting a note at Template Talk:Infobox school; that template appears to have more editors who watch it and they might be able to provide some good advice. I don't know if there is any appetite for or experience with adding several "last update" parameters associated with existing parameters so we can explicitly display it in the infobox; it sounds like a feasible idea to me! The biggest drawback is that they would make an already long and complex infobox even moreso but as long as they're optional parameters then that shouldn't be a big deal.
 * I keep thinking that someday we need to buckle down and work with some folks - template editor, bot maintainer, perhaps some subject matter experts (maybe AIR would be interested in creating a working group to provide us with advice?) - to automate the population and maintenance of many of the parameters of this template for most US colleges and universities. IPEDS alone has much of the data for many of the parameters that need to be updated on an annual basis so if we could ever agree to a process then a bot could update those parameters annually. Or we could update the template to pull the data from Wikidata and work with someone to update Wikidata on annual basis (I get the strong impression that many Wikipedia editors dislike that approach as it's opaque). ElKevbo (talk) 23:11, 21 December 2020 (UTC)
 * , to clarify, endowment_year is currently at Infobox organization, not here, but editors often add the endowment year manually, as at the UMD example.
 * I'll put an invite at the school infobox, as it faces a similar question.
 * Regarding more substantial work and automation, I'm down to help with that. Personally, I'm a fan of integration with Wikidata, since hosting data is what it's designed to do, which means it has advantages like multilingualism. It has its issues (e.g. vandalism, lack of user friendliness), but those will be resolved in time, so I think the more forward-looking approach is to use it from the start, rather than investing effort in a bunch of bots that we'd eventually have to convert to Wikidata. It's a big task, so getting help from professional folks like AIR would be fantastic.
 * The pertinence of the automation discussion to this discussion is that, whereas currently many of these parameters are outdated and thus require highlighting so that readers aren't misled into thinking they're current, once they're reliably being automatically updated, I think we'll feel more comfortable putting the year of update in less visible places like the reference. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 23:29, 21 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Regarding more substantial work and automation, I'm down to help with that. Personally, I'm a fan of integration with Wikidata, since hosting data is what it's designed to do, which means it has advantages like multilingualism. It has its issues (e.g. vandalism, lack of user friendliness), but those will be resolved in time, so I think the more forward-looking approach is to use it from the start, rather than investing effort in a bunch of bots that we'd eventually have to convert to Wikidata. It's a big task, so getting help from professional folks like AIR would be fantastic.
 * The pertinence of the automation discussion to this discussion is that, whereas currently many of these parameters are outdated and thus require highlighting so that readers aren't misled into thinking they're current, once they're reliably being automatically updated, I think we'll feel more comfortable putting the year of update in less visible places like the reference. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 23:29, 21 December 2020 (UTC)
 * The pertinence of the automation discussion to this discussion is that, whereas currently many of these parameters are outdated and thus require highlighting so that readers aren't misled into thinking they're current, once they're reliably being automatically updated, I think we'll feel more comfortable putting the year of update in less visible places like the reference. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 23:29, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Required fields
In the documentation,,   and   are "required" fields. In reality, I don't see this in the code, and in fact, in many cases these fields are missing with no detrimental effect or even a warning notice. Should the documentation be changed, or otherwise these fields made mandatory in some way? --Muhandes (talk) 14:37, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Those parameters being marked as "required" in the Template Data is an error. The template code does not require any of those parameters. You are welcome to fix the error. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:16, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
 * All right, done. --Muhandes (talk) 15:41, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I've reverted that. The "required" attribute works with Visual Editor and designates those fields which the VE will present to be filled in when an editor first inserts the template. If you remove all of the "required" fields, the VE will not suggest any fields to the editor and that is not desirable behaviour. --RexxS (talk) 22:53, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Okay, I've tried to restore as much of the edit as I can. Setting the flag to "suggested" instead of "required" will allow the fields to be skipped in the VE, although it will still request them to be filled in. I've left the  flag for address and postcode to hint that they are only to be used in rare cases. See if that is working for you now. --RexxS (talk) 23:27, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Okay, I've tried to restore as much of the edit as I can. Setting the flag to "suggested" instead of "required" will allow the fields to be skipped in the VE, although it will still request them to be filled in. I've left the  flag for address and postcode to hint that they are only to be used in rare cases. See if that is working for you now. --RexxS (talk) 23:27, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Alumni parameter
The alumni parameter is undocumented, but from the archives here, it appears to be used for documenting the number of alumni an institution has. This doesn't really seem like an infobox-worthy piece of data to me, since it's basically just a function of an institution's size and age, and we have both of those already listed. Would there be support for removing it? &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 09:59, 21 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes. It doesn't seem like a very informative or defining piece of information for readers. For US institutions, it's also not something that is included in any of the standard data sources so it's not only difficult to include consistently comparable information but also difficult to include if we ever move to more maintainable automated processes. ElKevbo (talk) 22:58, 21 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Alright, I went ahead and deprecated it. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 15:26, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

Should the "chairperson" parameter be removed?
Does anyone have any information about the history and use of the chairperson/chairman parameters in this template? In the U.S. context, that label is used almost exclusively to refer to the head of the institution's board of trustees. That is certainly an important organization for most institutions but given the role of the board it doesn't seem like the name of the chair is an essential institutional characteristic that readers should know immediately (or at all). Does it have a different meaning and context in other countries? In those other contexts, is it essential information that merits inclusion in the infobox? ElKevbo (talk) 03:44, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Please note that ElKevbo has brought his question here, but that a consensus discussion is underway at Talk:Cooper Union regarding ElKevbo's removal of the name of the Chairperson from the infobox of that article, and my objection to the removal. I think this is something that, in all fairness, ElKevbo might have mentioned. Beyond My Ken (talk) 04:02, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The world doesn't revolve around you. Moreoever, I explicitly told you in that discussion that this was something that I had been meaning to bring up for some time. It's entirely appropriate to ask the broader questions about the utility of this parameter separate from a discussion of its use in one article.
 * Can you answer my questions or otherwise contribute to the discussion? ElKevbo (talk) 04:21, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
 * My answer to your question in regard to Cooper Union is relevant to the general case as well. With Cooper Union, the Board of Directors, of which the Chairperson is the head, was heavily involved in the decisions which lead to the Cooper Union financial crisis and tuition protests, and that's because the Boards of Directors of colleges and universities make higher-level decisions than does the President, those involving budgets, tuition, endowments, etc. Because they make these basic fiscal decisions, there certainly must be other instances in which the Boards of other colleges and universities instigated controversy, criticism, and protests.  Consider also Liberty University and their relationship with Jerry Falwell Jr. and his eventual resignation.  The name of the Chairperson would be extremely relevant to that situation.  Other similar instances involving the firing (and hiring) of high-level school officials are also Board matters, and in many cases these decisions can be highly controversial and publicly debated -- and the name of the Chairperson is certainly, therefore, as relevant as the name of the President.I see no valid reason to drop the "Chairperson" parameter.  Many infoboxes will, of course, not make use of it, but it should be there for editors to use. Beyond My Ken (talk) 04:44, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Two unusual examples doesn't rise to the level of inclusion of a parameter in an infobox used in all of these articles. We can easily cite the names of other people at institutions who have been as influential but that doesn't mean that we should add a parameter to the infobox so we can add their titles and names to those articles (especially not when there are free parameters that could be used in those highly unusual situations). It's extremely rare that trustees play prominent roles in the histories and operations of institutions, even the chairs. In the U.S., at least. I'm not certain if this is the case in other countries and that is why I am asking these questions. ElKevbo (talk) 04:55, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
 * You're a scholar of American higher education, and you don't know of any other instances where university board activities would make the name of the chairperson of the board relevant information?? I find that very difficult to believe.In any case, you've made up your mind, and I've made up my mind, it's up to other editors to make the decision. I judge your argument to be the weaker one, so I'll back off and allow you to proselytize for your POV. Beyond My Ken (talk) 04:58, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The UK equivalent would be "Chair of Council". I don't think they aren named on many Wikipedia pages, although this could be because neither "chairman" nor "chairperson" is commonly used to refer to them. They certainly have a number of responsibilities, similar to the Non-executive chairs of corporations – who do seem to be generally named if a company has split CEO and chair positions (e.g. Marks & Spencer) following the advice for Template:Infobox company. It would seem best to treat universities like other corporations and include this information in the infobox, and it would also be good to have an option for "chair" for those places that use this form. Robminchin (talk) 03:37, 19 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Do the UK publications that summarize colleges and universities typically include this information in their summaries? (Some examples of US-focused publications include the federal government's College Navigator and U.S. News & World Report's rankings.) ElKevbo (talk) 03:59, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Improving the use of the "Affiliation" and "Academic affiliation" parameters
The guidance provided in the documentation for this template is lacking in helpful details for most parameters. There are four "affiliation" parameters: affiliation, religious_affiliation, academic_affiliation, and sporting_affiliation. The religious and sporting affiliation parameters have some natural, built-in clarity (there are still significant issues with each of these but they can be dealt with separately at a different time). The generic affiliation parameter and academic affiliation parameter have no clarity and there is significant heterogeneity in how they're used in articles. The definition for the generic affiliation parameter in the current documentation is "The institute's affiliation (if not specifically religious or academic)." and the definition for the academic affiliation parameter is "Use if the institution has an academic affiliation." These are so vague that they're not helpful for editors and have resulted in very inconsistent usage in articles that is not informative for readers.

(I have previously discussed this briefly in the past but am going into more detail now with organized proposals.) ElKevbo (talk) 06:39, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Proposal for the academic affiliation parameter
I propose revising and tightening the definition for the academic affiliation parameter: "Academic organizations of which the institution is a member and provide essential definition of the institution (mission, values, activities, etc.)." The objective would be to limit this parameter to data that provide meaningful information about the institution. This would place the parameter and its usage in line with how we already think about categories as "essential—defining—characteristics of a topic." It would ensure that the data included in this parameter is not superfluous or unnecessary.

In practice, this would limit the entries in this parameter to organizations that are focused, specialized, or selective. In the U.S. context, this would mean omitting organizations such as the American Council on Education (ACE), Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), and Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) as those organizations have such broad memberships and missions that they don't provide meaningful information about their members. On the other hand, membership in organizations such as the Association of American Universities (AAU) or Association of Franciscan Colleges and Universities (AFCU) do provide meaningful information to readers as they have membership criteria that ensure that members share essential characteristics.

If this proposal is accepted by the community then it seems like there would two natural next steps. First, we'd want to identify the organizations whose membership appears to satisfy the criteria that we establish for either inclusion or exclusion in this parameter. Second, we'd then edit the infoboxes of articles to add or remove the organizations (and if we have criteria that is close or identical to what is used for categorization then we could also be adding and removing articles from categories at the same time). This second step sounds like a good job for a bot if we can properly organize everything. ElKevbo (talk) 06:39, 1 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Having heard no objections, I have (a) edited the documentation for this template to match the proposed language above and (b) edited many articles about U.S. colleges and universities to remove affiliations that appear to be minor or non-exclusive. I kept some notes about these affiliations in my sandbox. ElKevbo (talk) 23:13, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Proposal for the generic affiliation parameter
I'm not sure what to do with the generic affiliation parameter. It seems like a good idea to have a generic parameter given the extremely wide scope of this infobox; I am skeptical that anyone can predict all of the possible needs of editors and readers even in this relatively narrow area. However, it seems like it would be good to have language similar to what is proposed for the academic affiliation parameter with the obvious removal of "academic:" "Organizations of which the institution is a member and provide essential definition of the institution's core mission and values." The same reasoning for the academic affiliations proposal applies.

In practice, I am unsure what effect this would have on many articles. That is because for every article that I've recently edited to change this parameter I've placed nearly every listed organization in the academic affiliations or sporting affiliations parameters. The only exception I can think of offhand are tribal colleges where we have their tribal affiliation in this parameter (in some cases, at least; I would not be surprised if this were placed in one of the free parameters in some cases). ElKevbo (talk) 06:39, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm on board with reforming and better defining these parameters. While we do so, I'd like us to consider the placement, per the post I made that's now in archive 16.
 * The "essential definition" standard seems alright. One question that comes to mind is how we'd want to handle memberships that might be defining but also redundant to other information. For insurance, membership in the 568 Group is basically just saying need-blind, and it'll be a lot easier to just state that directly than to use the group as a proxy. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 06:59, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Having heard no objections, I have made the proposed change in the template documentation. I kept in and tweaked the previous existing language that also points editors to the more specific academic and religious affiliation parameters, too. ElKevbo (talk) 23:14, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Academic calendar type parameter?
One piece of information I see at some websites but not in our template is academic calendar type (semester, 4-1-4, trimester, etc.). I'm not sure how important or unimportant to see that as, but I'm interested to hear what others think. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 00:20, 23 May 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure that the kind of short description we can fit into the infobox would be helpful for readers. In my experience and to the best of my knowledge, the differences between the common calendar/course schedules are not terribly substantive. A handful of U.S. institutions do have unique schedules (some online institutions have courses that begin each month; a minor example is my current institution which has an extended winter semester to accommodate a large number of study abroad courses during that time) but they're probably too complex and nuanced to succinctly describe in a few words for the infobox. ElKevbo (talk) 00:59, 23 May 2021 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 22 May 2021
Please add to the beginning of the template code:. This will add an automatically generated short description to pages transcluding this template. (I'm also open to suggestions on changing the wording —  is the best I could come up with, but it you have something better, go for it!) Tol &#124; Talk &#124; Contribs 23:14, 22 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Ideally, we might want to incorporate the location and type into the automatic short descriptions. Not sure if that's possible (especially with type), though. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 00:24, 23 May 2021 (UTC)
 * That sounds like a really good suggestion. I don't know if concatenating those fields (with " in " between them) would make many of them too long as the guidance for short descriptions says they should be "no more than about 40 characters."
 * Additionally, the "type" parameter for many articles only has one or more adjectives and no noun (e.g., only "Private" instead of "Private college" or "Public, research" instead of "Public research university"). This really annoys me and I've been quietly changing them as I see them but I haven't yet made a systematic effort to do this. (After - if - we add the accreditation parameter to the infobox, I plan to make a couple of proposals about the type parameter; formalizing this - it should include a noun - is one of them.)
 * I've been wondering if the lede sentence of most articles could be easily adapted for a short description. I haven't pursued this idea because of the length issue mentioned above. (And careful observers will note that I've also been slowly editing articles to ensure that the "type" parameter and the that part of the lede sentence match, or at least come really close.) ElKevbo (talk) 01:08, 23 May 2021 (UTC)
 * I'd definitely like to see that discussion about the type parameter take place; standardizing that would be a good use of our coordinating efforts. I don't think we should make the decision for the sake of generating short descriptions, but if we go in a direction that makes it easy to create them that'll be a nice side effect. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 20:17, 23 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Incorporating location seems like a good idea; other auto-shortdescs already have this function. As for length, this template (rather conveniently) can separate location into,  / , and  . I think these take precedence over the simple   parameter. The best way to do this would probably be:
 * If there are,  / , or   parameters then prefer them:
 * If only one: use it
 * If two: try both (in form [smaller], [larger]), fallback to the larger one
 * If all: try ", / ,  ", fallback to " ,  ", and then " "
 * If there's only : use it
 * If none, or the shortest of the above is too long, omit it.
 * Of course, this is rather large and I'm not quite comfortable enough with template markup to create the code for this quickly. Tol &#124; Talk &#124; Contribs 02:27, 23 May 2021 (UTC)
 * The location can get tricky fast if we're trying to truly optimize. The consensus in this area about things like U.S. vs. United States and whether or not to give the country is not clear. Personally, I think we should go out to highest level that most international readers will recognize. So Columbia University would be Private university in New York City (since NYC is generally known, so no need to go higher), CalTech would be Private university in Pasadena, California (Pasadena is not generally known but California is), and Northern Nationalities University would be University in Yinchuan, Ningxia, China (since Yinchuan and Ningxia are not generally known, so we have to go up to the country level). &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 20:12, 23 May 2021 (UTC)

are you still discussing this, or this change ready? &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 19:06, 26 May 2021 (UTC)