Talk:William Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby de Eresby

Deletion of Infobox

Hi Lobsterthermidor,

You deleted the Infobox for this article today with the comment that it is 'irrelevant'. My impression is that Wikipedia encourages the use of Infoboxes for biographies so that readers can quickly assess whether they have the article on the correct person, and can easily access major facts concerning that person without having to scan through the entire article. In many cases Infoboxes also provide quick links for the reader to other articles which may interest him/her such as the subject of the article's parents, children, place of birth and death, etc. Could you please restore it? As this issue is likely of interest to members of the Biography Project, I'll also post my comment there so that there can be discussion as to what criteria might be developed for deciding if and when an Infobox is relevant or irrelevant. Best, NinaGreen (talk) 21:53, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

I couldn't find the correct place to post my comments at the Biography Project when I looked just now, so I haven't done that. However I did find the section 'Benefits of Infoboxes' at [1]. The benefits are listed as:

Benefits of infoboxes

• A quick and convenient summary of the key facts about a subject, in a consistent format and layout

• Emission of machine readable metadata

o Infoboxes about people, places, buildings, organisations, products, species and dated events (battles, sports fixtures, record releases, etc) and more emit microformats; see Wikipedia:microformats

o Data is made available to third party tools such as DBpedia and Freebase

o Forthcoming integration with Wikidata

It thus seems that Wikipedia actively encourages the use of Infoboxes, and that there are long-term plans to utilize the data in them.

Could you please restore the Infobox? Thanks. NinaGreen (talk) 22:08, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Infoboxes can be useful when the topic is very complex. This article is a straight-forward & short biog. It merely repeats info which is rapidly accessible already in this very short article, now with section headers covering all the points in the box, and burdens the page unneccessarily. Infoboxes can be a real scourge in short articles, but I'm not against them per se, only when used indiscriminately. Use of infoboxes should be justified by the length & complexity of the article where they can be really useful, not for a 1/2 page article in which the box takes up much of the space. The picture was a distraction, with no useful caption. Better none at all than a church for a biog.! (maybe OK for Christopher Wren!) I suggest a coat of arms as a fallback lead image, but this one is tricky. In summary, you state the infobox to be "A quick and convenient summary of the key facts about a subject", fine, but where the article itself is little more than "A quick and convenient summary of the key facts about a subject" it's just duplication, and gets in the way. That's my personal opinion, let's have some flexibility here and not apply WP guidelines thoughtlessly. (Lobsterthermidor (talk) 22:43, 16 February 2013 (UTC))

Thanks for the reply, Lobsterthermidor. I've personally found Infoboxes very useful and convenient (especially when they include links), even in relatively short biographical articles by other editors, which is why I routinely include them in biographical articles which I create or expand. I'm sure many other Wikipedia readers and editors feel the same. In addition, this article went through a DYK review, and no objection was made to either the image and caption, or to the Infobox itself, in the DYK review process, so needless to say I was very surprised when you deleted both yesterday. There are no restrictions in the Wikipedia policy on 'Benefits of Infoboxes' above. Even Infoboxes in relatively brief articles would presumably yield the machine readable metadata mentioned in the policy statement, and that alone would be a reason for including an Infobox in a biographical article. I would therefore respectfully ask again that you restore the deletions you made so that the article is as it was when it successfully passed the DYK review and was featured on DYK. Best, NinaGreen (talk) 18:01, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

I posted a link to this discussion at the Talk page [2] for the Wikipedia Project on Infoboxes, as there happens to be a current discussion of deletion of Infoboxes going on there. NinaGreen (talk) 18:20, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

For the sake of completeness, it's also worth noting that a study has apparently established that many Wikipedia readers look first at the Infobox. See [3] and [4]. NinaGreen (talk) 20:11, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

You appear to imply that every biographical article should have an info-box to provide basic info such as date of birth, death, wife's name, childrens' names, etc. (which is basically all the info-box here contained, apart from an image of a church, which was distracting). These are already readily and rapidly obtainable from the article and referenced from the contents box. The info-box can be a useful tool when used with discrimination, where it helps steer the reader through a complex article/topic, for example a monarch, pope, statesman, general with highly complex careers and family relationships. This article contains no such complex info. Info-box here adds nothing but distraction, needless duplication and clutter to this short article, which will probably never grow much as source data is limited. If the article is expanded and grows more complex, then an info-box might be needed. At present it is unneccessary - in my opinion. What the critical volume of text/complexity of the article is which should trigger the deployment of the info-box I don't know, but you must surely accept that a stub article of a few lines does not warrant one, whilst an article on Winston Churchill does. Where on the continuum does the info-box kick-in? (Lobsterthermidor (talk) 10:52, 14 May 2013 (UTC)) I have re-read the last line of your first post re: "discussion as to what criteria might be developed for deciding if and when an Infobox is relevant or irrelevant", I fully support that. (Lobsterthermidor (talk) 11:00, 14 May 2013 (UTC))

I agree with Nina that an infobox would be beneficial in this article, for the various reasons she gives. Your objections appear to be arguing a case against against biographical infoboxes on all but our longest articles, rather than of the subject of this particular article. I suggest that you raise an RfC prohibiting them at that level, if you believe that the current common practice of using them for biographies is unacceptable. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:22, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

This seems as good a place as any to put on the record something which has been bothering me. I've done a great deal of editing in the past several months on dozens of different articles, and I've noticed that most of the follow-up by other editors hasn't been the addition of substantial new content or references and citations, but rather the deletion of various things or quibbling over minor details. This strikes me as counter-productive. There are literally hundreds of English historical and biographical articles which require substantial improvement; many of them have tags to that effect, indicating that they are either stubs, or that they lack sufficient references and citations from reliable sources. Why do editors interested in the Tudor and Stuart and earlier periods in English history tend to delete things which have been recently added to articles or quibble over minor details rather than improving them by the addition of new content, references and citations? There's so much work which needs to be done. Why focus on deleting things and quibbling over minor details? NinaGreen (talk) 15:54, 14 May 2013 (UTC)