User:Jorge Stolfi/Navboxes should be banned

Navboxes in general are a terrible idea, and almost all of them have strictly negative value, for readers and editors alike. They should be banned from Wikipedia.

What is a navbox
A navbox is a template that iserts a list of links to a set of articles on a given topic, usually in alphabetic order, sometimes divided by sub-topic. The first navboxes were narrow and tall tables meant to be displayed near the top of the article, on the right-hand side. Recently, many of them have been converted to a horizontal table format, to be inserted at the end of the article; and they usually collapse to a horizontal bar when there are several of them.

Bad model of reader behavior
A navbox is created on the assumption that the reader who reads an article will next want to read some or all the other articles that, in the opinion of the navbox author, should be grouped together and separated from all other articles. However, it is extremely unlikely that a reader, expert or not, will want to navigate through wikipedia that way. Not even the navbox author. Imagine a reader who looked up "Amazon River" (not "List of large rivers"), and managed to read all that he wanted of the article without clicking on any other wikilink: why would she want to read about "Nile River" next?

One type of navbox that may seem to have some usefulness is the type that connects articles in a series, eg. Popes, President, kings in a dynasty, etc. Those navboxes typically provide buttons to move to the next or previous member of the list. However, even those navboxes assume that readers will want to do scan the articles that way. Will they? Or would they rather go to a "Presidents of the US" article, and open the relevant articles from there, in separate browser tabs?

For reader navigation, wikilinks embedded in articles are infinitely more convenient and powerful than navboxes. They can provide clues to the reader about what he will find in the target. They can be sorted and selected to find the particular context and to suit the readers that are reading a particular topic. They can cope with arbitrarily complicated situations that break navboxes, such as the parallel Papacy, merging and splitting of dynasties, gaps and unknown ordering, etc..

A navbox is a canned "See Also" section; but nowhere as effective, because it provides no explanations (just a list of names) and cannot be tailored or sorted to fit individual articles.

Waste of screen estate
The old-style navboxes, that are placed at the top of the article, are particularly obnoxious. They waste a large chunk of valuable real estate, that should be used for interesting images or text. They also steal the reader's attention: he will instinctively start reading them instead of the head paragraph. Moreover, by their placement they implicitly assume that the reader who got to "Amazon River" will want to immediately jump to "Nile River" before reading the "Amazon River" article.

The new navboxes, placed at the bottom, at least do not have these defects. But then they will be almost never used. How many readers scroll an article to the very bottom? What are they looking for? Will the navbox help them satisfy their need?

Waste of resources
Even if they do no direct harm to the article, navboxes comsume computer resources on the server, network, and browser.