User:Vegaswikian/Navbox essay

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

Navboxes were created to help quickly navigate to related articles. However as more are added this annoys readers so we now use tools like {{Navboxes}} to hide the navboxes which now take up too much space. In some ways, this is akin to Wikipedia:Overcategorization which attempts to address he proliferation of categories that can litter the bottom of articles and make scanning through those categories to find an area of interest difficult. As the number of templates increases, hidden or not, they increase the number of links from an article. This likely is adding links in violation of Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking. Do these links really follow the intent of WP:REPEATLINK? Repeat links are allowed when the first use is in a template. What about for articles that are already linked in the body of the article? How about when a link to another article is added in 2, 5, 10, or 25 templates. At what point does this become excessive?

Navboxes should only be added to articles when they really help improve the article itself and how it relates to other articles.

Another phenomenon is that editors seem inclined to add images that increase the size of the compressed navbox display. It is not uncommon to see these taking up the space of 3-5 standard headers. This adds nothing to navigation and results in more space needed to display the navboxes.