User:Pengo/teletaxo

I could never describe myself as a deletionist, but I am all for hiding information that isn't immediately useful.

So here's my proposal for a telescopic taxobox, allowing taxonomic groups which are currently missing to be simply hidden, rather than absent:

The shrunk version is more readable. The expanded version is more complete. And this way little compromise needs to be made between them. A third click could perhaps hide the classifcation all together, and show just the binomial name.

I was hoping the mechanism could coopt the Hide/Show button from the Table of Contents box, but my attempts have so far failed (see /teletaxotest). A page that does does something similar (but hides the whole box, not just parts) is here: User:Essjay/CVU/IRC/Verifications

Which classifications would be hidden would be set per species or taxon. (see parameters ending in _hide in the proposed template usage above).

Anyway, I've pretty much given up on making this myself. I suspect it would need some extra Javascript that would have to be added to the main javascript file of the Wikipedia. But anyone else who wants to give it a go, please do.

Note: I have noticed that the metadata on images is collapsable, and maybe the javascript it uses can be hijacked. (e.g. see Metadata section on Australia_Cairns_Koala.jpg) but I haven't attempted to use this approach as yet.

More ideas and other thoughts like this at my rants page.