User:Matthewhaugen/sandbox

Going in
Welcome to your scratchpad for today's exercises!

We will use the contents of this page and Wikipedia's sandbox (scratchpad) feature to learn about infoboxes and practise editing them.

We will focus on Wikipedia infoboxes today, although variations of the infobox are found on multiple Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia, Wikidata, Commons, etc.). Wikipedia is a well-used general reference source, and allows us to experiment with edits in the sandbox.

Slides from May 2020 presentation providing an overview of Wikipedia infoboxes and how they work.

Setup
To begin, click "Edit source" and copy and paste the contents of this entire page into your own sandbox.


 * + click Sandbox in the user toolbar in the top right corner. This opens your sandbox in a new window.
 * If your sandbox already has stuff on it, make a new subpage directly from the sandbox URL. The URL is in the address bar in your browser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:____/sandbox . After /sandbox, write /something.
 * For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Utl_jung/sandbox/workinghour1 takes me to a page which does not yet exist but can be started.
 * Once you are on the new subpage, click Start the... page or Create source (to the left of the search bar)
 * Copy and paste the contents of this page into your new subpage.
 * Tip: press +  to select all.
 * Finally, publish the page. You now have a copy of this page which you can freely edit.

How to use
Under each section, you will see instructions on what infobox to use and how. If you click Edit source on each section, you will see an editing area marked out with comments. These comments look like this:. They are hidden text often used to communicate helpful information (e.g. instructions, warnings) to other editors.

On the text (source) editor, press to display the results without saving.

Press to save changes.

Rule of thumb
You will find anything and everything you need to know about using a template (infoboxes included) in the documentation page for that template.

To "investigate" a template, view the page in edit mode and identify what template is in use. Then, find the page for that template (in the search box, type Template:(name of template) ) to see the documentation. For example: if I want to look up, I would search Template:Infobox film which gives me this page

Remember, templates are wrapped in squigglies and transclude some pre-written function.

In other words, our goal today is to:


 * Get comfortable using transclusion via Wiki markup
 * Get comfortable looking up a template and reading its documentation
 * Practise editing various parameters on infobox templates

Use an infobox
Think of the most recent movie you watched. Then, insert an Infobox film below.

Use a Wikidata-powered infobox
Let's try using a WD-powered infobox with Infobox person/wikidata.

Generally, the template page documents everything you need to know about using that infobox.

Since we're in a sandbox, we will need to manually assign a qid and a name.

For example, the code below returns:

You can also organise this more nicely:

Do this exercise for one figure of your choice with a Wikidata item, and for Ludwig van Beethoven. Once you succeed, try different variations using the following parameters:

suppressfields dateformat noicon onlysourced

Fully automatic infobox
Infobox gene uses its own module customised to pull and display Wikidata without local manipulation.

Since we're in a sandbox and not the article (which contains the interwiki link), we will need to manually provide some input. Reference the template page and reproduce the infobox in Beta-2 microglobulin below.

Infobox gene

Archives at (P485) workaround
Use Archival records as a workaround for the block on on English Wikipedia infoboxes. Thi

Location (institution where archives are held), Inventory number, and Description URL parameters pull from Wikidata if left blank.

It is recommended that you also specify the following parameters:

title

For example, the code below produces:

I can also insert any field manually:

Produce the template for a figure with an property in their Wikidata entry. If you don't have anyone in mind, try Ella Maillart.