Forum:Infobox suggestions

Overview
I've been quite unsatisfied with the infoboxes here for a while. They require you to type in way more than you need to in order to put up a picture, they produce a lot of blank space if you don't fill in every variable and they're "thin black line"-heavy. So here's a side-by-side comparison of the exact same variables in two different styles of infobox. The one on the left is my proposal of what we should change to (although colors can obviously be changed easily).

General infobox (people, objects, astronomical objects, species, etc.)
Note the differences between the two boxes. The new one has no border around the whole box, but a fully colored interior that frames the picture. Most strikingly, the old one is almost as long as the new one — and it doesn't have a picture on it!

The new version also automatically links the picture. To get the picture up, all I did was type in image=Tegan.jpg. Simple, easy, no worries about inverted brackets, missing punctuation or anything else. As long as you know the simple name of the file, the picture appears. More importantly, it gives editors no choice as to the width. All pictures using this infobox are 250px, period. This will achieve uniformity across the stie, something another thread has been complaining about.

But you can see the major downside. It'll obviously mean that every single existing infobox will have to have its brackets manually edited out. Controversial, to be sure, but ultimately massively beneficial. Yes, the new box can be rewritten to handle the existing format, but we'd lose the ability to set the width automatically.

But here's the unambiguously better bit. Variables not entered do not produce a blank line, or try to substitute a word like "unknown". Note how "type" appears in the old box as "unknown", but doesn't appear in the left at all. If the information's not available, no space is wasted on it. There are a ton of species where we don't now, nor will we ever, know the planet of origin. Likewise, there are a lot of objects of unknown origin or planets of unknown location. If the canon doesn't tell us, don't leave a blank space for someone to fill in with conjecture out of a misguided need to fill it out "the best way possible." This style will be especially beneficial to, say, comic infoboxes, where many early comics don't have a credit for, say, inker or pencils, but they do have a credit for "art" or "artist". There should be flexibility in the box to fill in the precise credit, by allowing certain categories to fade away depending on available information.

This sort of thing can be done for every infobox on the wiki. We could get real control over our infoboxes by putting a whole lot more style into them. We can even put little icons into the infoboxes, if we wanted, so that on series episode pages there's the logo of the programme in question. Maybe a small TARDIS for DW, and the faces of Captain Jack and SJS for their series. Check out the SMDM episode template for an idea of what that might look like.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍  07:47, 14 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I like your proposals. I would put in a space for relatives and aliases and keep the current color scheme. also, as I have suggested here before, I think that companions and Doctors should have their own kind of template, listing (in both cases), their introductory story (in both stories) and then they left or regenerated (respectively). --Stardizzy2 15:34, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Comic (but adaptable to episodes, novels, radio plays, etc.)
Okay, here's another iteration for more complicated story pages. This one is specifically the comic template.

As before, the big goal was to make most of the existing variables work. However, as above, there's still the idea we have to go in and manually edit the brackets off picture names. Unfortunately, this one requires a bit more than that. Honestly, if I'd been here from the beginning, I'd have pushed for most variables to be just that: plain variables. You can program those variables to go into brackets, giving you much greater control. It's kinda silly to have repetitively typed Second Doctor in al these infoboxes when one little edit to the infobox would've linked every instance in an infobox, wiki-wide. Anyway, I've left most of the variables alone, cause it would be so laborious to go back through and do it by hand.

Nevertheless, to streamline navigation, all story names would have to be de-linked at the same time we de-linked the picture names. You may wish to head over to template:infobox test comic2 to see all the possible variables. Most are collapsed in this simple example.

The template gives you the ability to set up navigation amongst three different story arcs, along with the simple chronological-by-publication-date navigation. It also allows a greater range of credits than you'd ever use in a TV Comic story like this one. Pencillers, Inkers, Letterers, and Colourists are all possible with this template; whereas Pencillers and Inkers don't seem possible in the original.

Also, note that icons are possible to liven up the box. This might be slightly more important on those many stories for which we don't currently have pictures. I'm not particularly pushing for the one I've included, but it seemed to get the point across most easily. If you create a transparent .png pic (i.e., one with an alpha channel), it looks pretty cool, emphasizing the irregular shape. It's also clickable, taking you to the master page for all comic stories.

In a sense, this picture is a bad one to demonstrate the template, because it's long. It's making the whole template elongated. But if you look at the way it fills out the old infobox on THe Night Walkers page, you can see that this new infobox saves a lot of space — mostly horizontal.

Lemme know what you think.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍  07:33, 15 May 2009 (UTC)