Wikipedia talk:Geographical infoboxes

Because the geography related infobox templates are "owned" by a variety of Wikiprojects their look and feel varies considerably. For example, Template:Infobox City, Template:Infobox U.S. state, and Template:Infobox Country currently have three distinctly different appearances, and a user traversing from Boston, Massachusetts to Massachusetts to United States sees each of these. Style differences between these templates include:


 * Use of shading for row labels, as in template:Infobox City.
 * Specification of font, as in template:Infobox Country.
 * Use of borders, as in template:Infobox U.S. state.
 * Use of non-stylesheet visual effects, as in template:Infobox Country to create not-quite full width horizontal borders (done by embedding a borderless table inside a 1em larger bordered div).

I propose we adopt guidelines roughly like the following:

1) These guidelines shall apply to Template:Infobox Country, all similar country-specific infoboxes, and all city and national subdivision infobox templates, collectively called geographical place infoboxes.

2) All geographical place infoboxes shall use CSS class, as defined in common.css with no style overrides.

3) No geographical place infobox shall use embedded  in corresponding label and value cells to define subrows.  This technique makes the content difficult to understand if using a non-visual browser (such as a screen reader).

4) Row labels shall use the HTML  tag (or wikitable equivalent, i.e. !).

4) Collections of related rows shall use no CSS styles to create or inhibit borders other than the,  , and   styles definied in common.css.

Note that the styles that are referred to are not (all) defined yet. As a starting point for discussion, I suggest we first agree on the general principles (as above) and then work out what the styles should be.

-- Rick Block (talk) 17:32, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

Not the same as Wikipedia:Infobox standardisation
I'm aware of Infobox standardisation, which is a similar idea but applied to all infoboxes. The key difference is that this proposal is domain specific, applying to only a set of infoboxes I'd think most readers would expect to have a consistent look. -- Rick Block (talk) 17:44, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

My preferences
Of all those three templates above, I *strongly* prefer the country infobox one, so I suggest we take that as the basis for our standard... &mdash; Nightst a  llion  (?) 05:40, 26 June 2006 (UTC)


 * In the spirit of full disclosure, I believe it is true that if we accept the guideline that the look must be from common.css styles, the current country infobox cannot be the exact basis for the standard (it's look is created by non-stylesheet mechanisms). There's a thread at template talk:Infobox Country about this. -- Rick Block (talk) 13:19, 26 June 2006 (UTC)


 * My 2¢: Visually, I kind of like the country infobox best. However, there are elements of the others that I like as well.  In the infobox city template, I like the grey shading of the "government" and "Geographical characteristics" but not the other grey shading of fields like "Area" and "Population".  I am sure that the little details like that can be worked out, but the overall point is to have one look.  One look that works well.  MJCdetroit 18:27, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

Infobox country
I don't like the current infobox country. I've noticed the images stick out for many of the country articles such as India, China, Bhutan etc. Images should be resolved. =Nichalp  «Talk»=  05:49, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
 * If you have your font size set small enough this will happen because the current country infobox is sized in ems but contains images of a fixed pixel width. There are problems if your font size is too large as well.  I agree this issue needs to be resolved, but I'd like to stay away from detailed implementation considerations at this point and focus on the bigger consistency issue first.  Do you have a take on the guidelines suggested above? -- Rick Block (talk) 13:33, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

Create "Infobox:" namespace...?
Per Rick's suggestion, please also see here. Thanks, David Kernow (talk) 16:15, 30 September 2006 (UTC)