 | This help page is ahow-to guide. It explains concepts or processes used by the Wikipedia community. It is not one ofWikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels ofconsensus. |
| WikiProject Infoboxes | ||||
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| List of infoboxes | ||||
| Style and help | ||||
| Cleanup | ||||
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Aninfobox is a fixed-format table usually added to the top right-hand corner of articles to consistently present a summary of some unifying aspect that the articles share and sometimes to improve navigation to other interrelated articles. Many infoboxes also emit structuredmetadata which is sourced byDBpedia and other third party re-users. The generalized infobox feature grew out of the originaltaxoboxes (taxonomy infoboxes) that editors developed to visually express the scientific classification of organisms.
The use of infoboxes is neither required nor prohibited for any article. Whether to include an infobox, which infobox to include, and which parts of the infobox to use, is determined throughdiscussion and consensus among the editors at each individual article.
Infobox templates contain important facts and statistics of a type which are common to related articles. For instance, all animals have a scientific classification (species, family and so on), as well as a conservation status. Adding a{{taxobox}} to articles on animals therefore makes it easier to quickly find such information and to compare it with that of other articles.
Infobox templates are like fact sheets, or sidebars, in magazine articles. They quickly summarize important points in an easy-to-read format. However, they arenot "statistics" tables in that they (generally) only summarize material from an article—the information should still be present in the main text, partly because it may not be possible for some readers to access the contents of the infobox. In particular, if infobox templates hide long columns of data inside collapsing tables, then readers usingassistive technology may miss their presence entirely.
Many infoboxes also emit metadata such asmicroformats(seeWP:WikiProject Microformats).
In general, data in infobox templates should be:
In general, data in infobox templates should not have:
There are two steps required to add an infobox to an article:
In order to use an infobox in an article, an editor must know its name, parameters, and how those parameters are intended to be used. Because infoboxes are kept in anamespace separate from articles, it may take some effort to identify an infobox by name. Once the editor has the name, however, it is straightforward to look up the infobox's documentation.
There are two ways in which an editor typically determines which infobox they want to use:
For example, the articleD-Terminal contains an infobox. To determine the name of it, simply edit the article:
{{Infobox connector...}}
The "{{Infobox connector" identifies the markup between the enclosing braces as a use of the "connector" infobox. The editor can look up the documentation for the template, including a list of parameters, in the Template namespace underTemplate:Infobox connector.
If there is no existing infobox that seems to satisfy the article's needs, one may consider#Designing an infobox.
In accordance withWikipedia's Manual of Style, infoboxes should be placed at the top of an article after anydisambiguation links andmaintenance tags.
The infobox documentation page usually contains a convenient "blank" template that can be copied directly into the target article. The template consists of opening ({{) and closing (}}) double braces that contain the name of the infobox and a list of parameters without values. An editor then fills in the value for each of the parameters to the right of the corresponding equals sign.
For example:
{{Infobox person| name=| image=| caption= ...| website=}}
might be filled out like this:
{{Infobox person| name= Casanova| image= Casanova self portrait.jpg| caption= A self-portrait of Casanova...| website=}}
In this example, the names of the parameters ("name", "image", "caption", "website") are fixed in the design of the infobox and described in its documentation. A parameter that is misspelled, falsely capitalized, or is not supported by the infobox implementation does not display at all. To find out exactly which parameters are functional, look at the infobox's template page. Anything not listed there will be ignored, even if it works in some other infobox. If you believe that another parameter needs to be added to a given infobox template, then suggest that on the infobox's talk page.
The infobox documentation describes which parameters are required and which are optional. Required parameters display between triple braces (for example,{{{requiredparametername}}}) when previewed or published. Optional parameters may be left empty or omitted entirely.
If you added an infobox and it didn't display correctly, here are the common errors:
birth_place).File: before the image name (or you didn't, and it's one of the templates that requires it).Images are generally specified using theimage andcaption parameters. However, the template may use a different name for this parameter. For example,{{Infobox album}} uses "Cover" instead of "image" and "Caption" instead of "caption".
Theimage parameter sometimes requires theWikipedia:Extended image syntax; other times it requires only the image file name depending on the tastes of the editor who created the infobox. An editor can determine this either by experimenting (using the "preview" function) or by consulting the infobox template documentation.
Many images in infoboxes should have aspecial text alternative for people who cannot see the image.
If an article requires two or more infoboxes it is often possible to combine them into one, by including the others as a module (or child-, or sub-template) of the first. Alternately, it can be useful to use{{stack}} as a container for them to prevent layout problems with other images and floating elements in the article.
It is a good idea to seek the opinions of other editors before embarking on a design of a new infobox or redesign of an existing one. Most requirements are already met by an existing infobox and most of the remainder can be met with a tweak. Unnecessary duplication leads to clutter and article divergence. Prototype your new design in your ownuser space. Once prototyped, propose the infobox changes to the appropriateWikiProject and gainconsensus before deploying your new design in thetemplate namespace.
Requests to delete an infobox should be brought to the attention ofWikipedia:Templates for discussion and anyWikiProjects associated with the infobox. The WikiProject associated with the subject can usually be found at the top of the talk page of the article. A template may be merged with another rather than deleted outright.
Users can haveuser CSS that hides any infoboxes in their own browsers.
To hide all infoboxes, add the following toSpecial:MyPage/common.css (for allskins, orSpecial:MyPage/skin.css for just the current skin), on a line by itself:
div.mw-parser-output.infobox{display:none;}
Alternatively, you can add the following code toyour common.js or into a browser user script that is executed by an extension likeGreasemonkey:
$('.infobox').hide();
Be aware that although, perWP:Manual of Style/Infoboxes, all information in an infobox ideally should also be found in the main body of an article, there isn't perfect compliance with this guideline. For example, the full taxonomic hierarchy in{{Taxobox}}, and the OMIM and other medical database codes of{{Infobox disease}} are often not found in the main article content. The infobox is also often the location of the most significant, even only, image in an article. There is a userscript which removes infoboxes but moves the images contained to separate thumbnails:User:Maddy from Celeste/disinfobox.js.
