User:Jorge Stolfi/DoW/Infoboxes

[This was a comment of mint in Template talk:Infobox scientist ]

Please, folks, get rid of this template. This infobox wastes a lot of screen space to say things that can be said much better and more clearly in two lines of text. It contains many fields (like professional history, advisor, fields of work, etc.) which *must* be left to the text, because they are often too complicated to fit in an infobox format. The name is already given in the article's title and in the lead parag, so with the infobox that is repeating the same information repeatedly and superfluously over and over redundantly not less than *four* times. Even birth and death dates are often disputed, in which case that information cannot be properly fit in a box field. In fact, the only field that *does* belong in the infobox is the photo; but that item can be inserted in the article more easily *without* the infobox.

Besides the idea of fitting people's lives into neat little boxes is just too bureucratic to swallow. Don't forget that "Wikipedia is not a database" and "Wikipedia is not a directory". People infoboxes, besides having tons of disadvantages and no advantage whatsoever, are things that belong to a KGBpedia, not to Wikipedia.

Folks, please stop and think. Infoboxes are not good things. They are not a standard feature of Wikipedia; the people who invented them and started adding them to articles never asked other editors what they thought about the concept. Infoboxes are a virus, a malignant cancer that is turning a once enjoyable encyclopedia into an utterly boring pile of forms and stamps. Adding infoboxes to articles is not merely a complete waste of your time, it is actually a form of vandalism, no matter how well intentioned. Please don't help spread this terrible virus. All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 18:59, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Comment by other: Infoboxes allow DBpedia queries like "All german scientists born between 1933 and 1945 that worked in the field of molecular biology".

If the infoboxes are useful for DBpedia, they should reside in DBpedia with interlinks from Wikipedia --- not the other way around. "Wikipedia is not a database". All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 13:00, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

PS. Besides there are better *public* databases for infoboxed info, such as the Mathematics Genealogy project, the DBLP, the Tree of Life, the SIL Interational laguage catalog, etc. Wikipedia is a very poor source for the query example you quoted, since it has very few academic bios (and the deletionists even want to prune them). Once more, "Wikipedia is not a database". All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 13:09, 1 February 2010 (UTC)