Aninfobox is a digital or physicaltable used to collect and present a subset of information about its subject, such as adocument. It is astructured document containing a set ofattribute–value pairs,[1] and inWikipedia represents a summary of information about the subject of anarticle.[2] In this way, they are comparable to datatables in some aspects. When presented within the larger document it summarizes, an infobox is often presented in asidebar format.
An infobox may be implemented in another document bytranscluding it into that document and specifying some or all of the attribute–value pairs associated with that infobox, known asparameterization.
An infobox may be used to summarize the information of an article onWikipedia.[3] They are used on similar articles to ensure consistency of presentation by using a common format.[4][2] Originally, infoboxes (and templates in general) were used forpage layout purposes.[2] An infobox may be transcluded into an article by specifying thevalue for some or all of itsparameters.[5] The parameter name used must be the same as that specified in the infobox template, but any value may be associated to it.[5] The name isdelimited from the value by anequals sign.[5] The parameter name may be regarded as an attribute of the article's subject.[6]
{{Infobox prepared food| name=| image=| image_size=| caption=| alternate_name=| country=| region=| creator=| course=| type=| served=| main_ingredient=| variations=| calories=| other=}} | {{Infobox prepared food| name= Crostata| image= Crostata limone e zenzero 3.jpg| image_size=| caption= Crostata with lemon ginger filling| alternate_name=| country=[[Italy]]| region=[[Lombardia]]| creator=| course=[[Dessert]]| type=[[Tart]]| served=| main_ingredient= Pastry crust,[[jam]] or[[ricotta]], fruit| variations=''Crostata di frutta'',''crostata di ricotta'', many other sweet or savoury variations| calories=| other=}} |
| The infoboxInfobox prepared food used on Wikipedia food-related articles, with novalues specified for itsparameters (attributes). | The same infobox as implemented in the articlecrostata. Values are to the right of theequals sign (=), and that the parameter names are the same as those in the specification for the infobox template. The values are inwiki markup: entries enclosed in square brackets (e.g. [[Tart]]) will be rendered as a link to the respective Wikipedia article (e.g.Tart), and the linked file will be transcluded into the article in place of its markup. |
On Wikipedia, an infobox is transcluded into an article by enclosing its name and attribute–value pairs within a double set ofbraces. TheMediaWiki software on which Wikipedia operates thenparses the document, for which the infobox and other templates are processed by atemplate processor. This is atemplate engine which produces aweb document and astyle sheet used for presentation of the document. This enables the design of the infobox to be separated from the content it manipulates;[2] that is, the design of the template may be updated without affecting the information within it, and the new design will automatically propagate to all articles that transclude the infobox.[4] Usually, infoboxes areformatted to appear in the top-right corner of a Wikipedia article in the desktop view,[3] or at the top in the mobile view.
Placement of an infobox within thewikitext of an article is important foraccessibility.[7] Abest practice is to place them followingdisambiguation templates (those that direct readers to articles about topics with similar names) and maintenance templates (such as that marking an article as unreferenced), but before all othercontent.[8][9]
Baeza-Yates and King say that some editors find templates such as infoboxes complicated,[10] as the template may hide text about a property or resource that the editor wishes to change; this is exacerbated by chained templates, that is templates transcluded within other templates.[10]
As of August 2009, English Wikipedia used about 3,000 infobox templates that collectively used more than 20,000 attributes.[11] Since then, many have been merged, to reduce redundancy. As of June 2013, there were at least 1,345,446 transclusions of the parentInfobox template,[12] used by some, but not all, infoboxes, on 4,251,127 articles.
The name of an Infobox is typically "Infobox [genre]"; however, widely used infoboxes may be assigned shorter names, such as "taxobox" for taxonomy.[8]
About 44.2% of Wikipedia articles contained an infobox in 2008,[13] and about 33% in 2010.[14] Automatedsemantic knowledge extraction usingmachine learning algorithms is used to "extract machine-processable information at a relatively low complexity cost".[1] However, the low coverage makes it more difficult, though this can be partially overcome by complementing article data with that incategories in which the article is included.[13] TheFrench Wikipedia initiated the projectInfobox Version 2 in May 2011.[15][16]
Knowledge obtained by machine learning can be used to improve an article, such as by using automated software suggestions to editors for adding infobox data.[13] The iPopulator project created a system to add a value to an article's infobox parameter via an automated parsing of the text of that article.[11]
DBpedia usesstructured content extracted from infoboxes[2] by machine learning algorithms to create a resource oflinked data in theSemantic Web; it has been described byTim Berners-Lee as "one of the more famous" components of the linked data project.[17]
Machine extraction creates a triple consisting of a subject, predicate or relation, and object.[1] Each attribute-value pair of the infobox is used to create anRDF statement using anontology.[18] This is facilitated by the narrower gap between Wikipedia and an ontology than exists between unstructured or free text and an ontology.[19]
Thesemantic relationship between the subject and object is established by the predicate.[1] In the example infobox, the triple ("crostata", type, "tart") indicates that acrostata is a type oftart. The article's topic is used as the subject, the parameter name is used as the predicate, and the parameter's value as the object.[18][1] Each type of infobox is mapped to an ontology class, and each property (parameter) within an infobox is mapped to an ontology property.[20] These mappings are used when parsing a Wikipedia article to extract data.
Presenting the basic facts of an article within an infobox allows the facts to be presented in a machine-friendly way, allowing extra functionality such as when a link to a Wikipedia article is pasted into a compatible program; instead of just the link itself being posted, other information such as the article's lead image is also posted.