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Template talk:Infobox writer/Archive 8

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Latest comment: 10 years ago by Garion96 in topic Adding mother and father as fields
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"Influences" and "Influenced"

Latest comment: 11 years ago23 comments10 people in discussion

These two fields are highly ambiguous in my opinion. Let's say we have an Infobox writer for A. Does "influences" mean "writers that A influences" or "A's influences include"? Does "influenced" mean "writers that A influenced" or "A is influenced by"? I honestly can't tell which means "A has influenced:" and which means "A was influenced by:". I'm by no means a writer, not even a native English speaker, but I think it would definitely benefit readers if just a little more effort was made to remove this ambiguity. {{Infobox programming language}}, for example, has "Influenced by" and "Influenced", which makes it very easy to tell one from the other. Wyverald (talk) 02:52, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

Please remove the "influences" and "influenced" fields from this infobox, per above discussion, and per the linked discussions. I'll update the docs once this is complete. –Quiddity (talk) 19:40, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

Hmm...it looks like there's a fair consensus for this, but would you be willing to be a little more specific about what needs removing? Do I just need to blank the lines that read:
| data26      = {{#if:{{{influences|}}}|<hr />{{Collapsible list|expand={{{expand|}}}|title=Influences|frame_style=border:none; padding: 0;|title_style=background:transparent; text-align:left;|list_style=text-align:left;|1={{{influences}}}}} }}

| data27      = {{#if:{{{influenced|}}}|<hr />{{Collapsible list|expand={{{expand|}}}|title=Influenced|frame_style=border:none; padding: 0;|title_style=background:transparent; text-align:left;|list_style=text-align:left;|1={{{influenced}}}}} }}
or is there more to it? ~Adjwilley (talk) 20:01, 4 August 2013 (UTC)
  Done --Redrose64 (talk) 21:11, 4 August 2013 (UTC)
Thanks Redrose64 for making the edit. My apologies to Adjwilley for not being clear in the editprotected request (I semi-suspected I wasn't being clear enough in the description, but lazyness overcame my hesitation! Point taken for next time. :) –Quiddity (talk) 02:13, 5 August 2013 (UTC)
What next?
This weekend I revised three biographies that include this template with influences and influenced data.
One was Ray Bradbury, with two long lists of linked names and four notes (one empty). There User:Dfeuer had questioned the two fields two months ago under the talk heading Influences/influenced. I replied under that heading at length, incorporating a copy of the infobox data (cut & paste except insertion of : * {reflist} for adequate display in the talk page context). Talk:Ray Bradbury#Influences/influenced.
For Clive Barker and Jeanne Birdsall, I moved the data to Talk with a brief explanation that cites my own longer explanation for Bradbury --under the same heading. Talk:Clive Barker#Influences/influenced; Talk:Jeanne Birdsall#Influences/influenced
Perhaps this work provides some boilerplate useful to others. Before I do any more of these I solicit comment here.
--P64 (talk) 18:30, 29 September 2013 (UTC)
P.S. My incipient boilerplate includes a two-line comment referral to Talk, which replaces the two fields in the infobox code. Its text: Infobox writer no longer supports the fields influences and influenced. See TALK.
Comment solicited also at Template talk:Infobox person. :::: --P64 (talk) 18:52, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

Automatic deletion of the data by User:Nikkimaria seems to be in progress. Template talk:Infobox person#Influences/influenced is the more appropriate place for discussion and I have directed User:N there. --P64 (talk) 18:09, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Nope. Nikkimaria (talk) 19:57, 16 October 2013 (UTC)
  • Only just noticed this. Influences and influenced might be poorly named, but the list of who and what affected the writer is one of the most important things in the infobox; the list of others who were affected by the writer, perhaps not quite as crucial, but still makes very good sense. The list of people/things that affected a writer has been, for years, the reason the infobox didn't need such revulsive kludges as a "religion" field (whose very existence would be an appalling violation of the concept of neutrality). Removing those fields, without replacing them, is a disastrous act. Something serving their purpose is needed; if different names are called for, fine. --Pi zero (talk) 23:51, 4 November 2013 (UTC)
  • I don't agree with the removal of these parameters, which can be very useful. There was only an RfC to remove them from infobox person, and even that was closed before the 30 days. SlimVirgin (talk) 00:08, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
  • The original objection here seems to have been to the names of the fields. What, then, would be more appropriate names for the fields? For example, to avoid ambiguity, one could use more verbose names influences on this writer and influenced by this writer. --Pi zero (talk) 03:44, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
  • That was not the primary objection to the use of the fields. I suggest you read the RfC on the subject. Influences should properly be discussed, explained, and cited in the body of an article. Nikkimaria (talk) 04:34, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
SlimVirgin mentioned that the RfC may have been deficient. I didn't participate in the discussion at Template talk:Infobox person#RfC: Should the "influences" & "influenced" parameters be removed? because there was overwhelming support for my preferred outcome, so I didn't bother. Same in this thread – but if there is a call for votes, mine is in favour of not having these two parameters. Why? What Quiddity said over there. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 06:10, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
  • An RfC for {{infobox person}} doesn't necessarily have any relevance at all to {{infobox writer}}; indeed, as I have mentioned, the influences/influenced fields (which I think should have different names, if we can come up with them) are important in {{infobox writer}}'s function as a specialized infobox. Generic infoboxes like {{infobox person}} are at a great disadvantage because they can't have well-chosen fields for a specific purpose (such as influences/influenced, whatever one calls them, which are particularly useful for writers), and consequently the generic infoboxes are forced to have lots of fields that are likely to be only occaisionally relevant. We have (or rather, had) carefully chosen fields here that obviated the need for zillions of problematic shot-in-the-dark fields dreamed up to supposedly cover obscure cases.
The idea that things should be covered in the body of the article and therefore shouldn't be in the infobox strikes me as seriously wrong-headed. Everything in the infobox should be in the article; that's got no relevance to whether it should go in the infobox. If you're opposed to having quick-reference summaries of information on subjects, you really should give up on Wikipedia entirely and go contribute to Wikibooks instead.
Anyway, as I said, an RfC for {{infobox person}} doesn't necessarily have any relevance here. The {{infobox person}} community is dominated by people who think generic infoboxes are a good idea, which afaics is not a dominant view outside their echo chamber (though of course they're likely to have a bigger community than any given specialized infobox, exactly because they're generic). Obviously, people who don't believe in specialized infoboxes aren't well qualified to judge optimal design of a specialized infobox since they don't even understand the philosophy behind it. Either you can state a succinct case, here, for eliminating these fields, or you can't; there's no merit it pointing to a rambling discussion about whether to remove the fields in a completely different infobox with different objectives and philosophy. --Pi zero (talk) 15:10, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
On the contrary, many of the arguments used there also apply here, and to other infoboxes that use influences/influenced. A list of names in an infobox doesn't tell the reader what the influence was nor who said that the influence existed (the subject or a third party). Both of these are better addressed by text in the article body, where there is room to contextualize the information. Nikkimaria (talk) 15:51, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
(I'm at a loss why you'd start with "On the contrary", since I see no contradiction to what I said, but it's a moot point since you're providing specific reasoning, which is just what I asked for, and I thank you for it.)
It still sounds to me like you're using the (I would have thought, obvious) fact that a more nuanced discussion should be provided in the article text as a reason not to provide a quick-reference summation of the big picture in the infobox. But I would always expect to see an expanded, nuanced discussion in the article; if such things are left to the infobox, the article text needs improvement. What do you see as the purpose of an infobox? I would think an infobox would provide a quick overview sense of the person, and in this case, broadly where the writer sits in the web of influence between writers seems to me to be a really fundamental way of understanding the topography of literature. I can well believe that for many kinds of people it would be undesirable to have such information in the infobox, and therefore a generic {{infobox person}} would be better off without it; but this is an inherent weakness of generic infoboxes, that they cannot rely on any particular subject topography to guide their choice of fields.
(I must admit, this is not the first time in recent years I've seen carefully thought out design decisions in narrow, specialized pockets of Wikipedia get overridden by folks who, right or wrong as they might be, really don't understand why the design decisions were made in the first place. The really disturbing thing about that is not whether the decisions reached (either the old decisions or the new ones) were good or bad decisions, but that the phenomenon demonstrates a fundamental lack of cumulative expertise in the way Wikipedia functions. I suspect the problem is that wiki technology supports managing documents, when a major part of what it needs to do, if the wikimedian movement is to survive in the long term, is managing expertise... but I digress.) --Pi zero (talk) 18:40, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
"On the contrary" was in response to your assertion that the RfC would not necessarily be relevant here; it quite clearly is. The "web of influence" you suggest is not compatible with a "quick overview sense", because the question is not as straightforward as "did A influence B? [y/n]", and a simple list of names expresses it as if it were. We would be doing readers a disservice to present person A, who was the fundamental model for B's whole creative output according to both B and scholars on the subject, and person C, who one journalist suggests might have influenced a certain turn of phrase by B, as equivalent influences; but a simple list of influences would include both, and give a reader quite the wrong idea. Furthermore, without knowing in what way the influence took place, even assuming that the names are recognized, the list offers little meaningful information to the reader. And of course the fact remains that in most cases entries were added to the infobox without accompanying nuanced information in the article, or indeed any support (internal or external) whatsoever. Nikkimaria (talk) 19:32, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
I said it doesn't necessarily apply here. Whether it does or not needs to be seriously considered, rather than robotically applying here ideas from an infobox of a fundamentally different nature. Hence my discomfort with the "contrary" phrasing. My discomfort isn't so much with the phrasing in itself, which is evidently informal anyway, but with the ambiguous suggestion of a dismissive attitude behind it. It's not "quite clear" that it applies here; considerations that apply to a generic infobox are quite different from those that apply to a specialized infobox, and assuming that the former apply to the latter could be a symptom of generic-infobox-itis.
A distinction needs to be made here between the possibility of getting something right, and the possibility of Wikipedia getting it right in the long run. Wikipedian workflow is about getting things right eventually; it doesn't matter whether things are wrong now, if we can statistically expect their wrong state to have a half-life.
I'm familiar with the phenomenon of an article element that serves as an attractive nuisance, something that passers by are likely to want to fiddle with in ways that make it wrong, so that even if one ever did get the element right, that right state would have a half-life, instead of wrong states having a half-life as one needs in order for the Wikipedian model to work. I'm willing to let that stand as a reason, for now, as long as nobody tries to foist on us something even worse, such as the abominable religion field that's been proposed from time to time. In the long term, of course, some solution is needed to the major problem that Wikipedia's workflow does not, afaik, allow anything to be gotten right and then stay that way until a consensus is reached to change it; such a means is needed to provide high quality, which in turn is a necessary element of recruitment; but yet again I digress.
Admittedly, I do find it disingenuous to suggest that it's impossible to usefully describe writers in a way that writers are routinely usefully described, and to make this claim based on a non-example whose only observable feature is that it, unrealistically, limits the list of influences to people, which probably aren't the most useful influences to list under most circumstances. Of course it's possible to usefully describe writers that way. It doesn't follow, alas, that Wikipedia is capable of describing writers that way, exactly because a discussion leading to consensus on what influences to list for a given writer would not result in the field remaining in the agreed-upon state. --Pi zero (talk) 23:16, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
I think the same issues, in a somewhat palliated form, exist here as in infobox person. Infoboxes are essentially structured to represent facts about their subjects as key-value pairs. This works well for some things, but when you come to "X was influenced by Y", you start to reach the limitations of that model. A sentence like that invites the question "Influenced in what way?", which is something that's not readily expressible in the key-value system. This is a problem that goes well beyond the attractive nuisance of such fields, and holds even if that expression is properly sourced. If we want to usefully describe writers in a routine way, we might use the routine method for doing so, which is writing in sentences. Choess (talk) 22:31, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
Exactly. Well explained.
Note: This was re-raised at Template_talk:Infobox_person#Influences/influenced parameters on November 3rd.
Plea: This is the kind of issue where examples are amazingly helpful (both at showing potential good results, and existing problems), and might lead to alternative solutions, or personal perspectives. See my Edward Gorey example, at the aforementioned link. (The author personally states dozens of names as being major influences, and various interviewers state additional names - How would we possibly select and contextualize that in an infobox listing?) –Quiddity (talk) 20:42, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Native name

Latest comment: 10 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

This infobox needs extra fields for "native_name" and and "native_name_lang", similar to those on Template:Infobox person. This would allow the addition of the players name in their own language. This is important for this infobox because many of the people described are not English: e.g. Chinese or Russian writers, and there is nowhere to list the name within the infobox causing many editors to shoehorn the Chinese text in the "name" field which then breaks the semantic hCard microformat that lies underneath the infobox. Rincewind42 (talk) 06:10, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

@Rincewind42: Added. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:11, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 20 December 2013

Latest comment: 10 years ago8 comments5 people in discussion

Please replace 

| label13     = Alma mater

with 

| label13     = {{nowrap|''[[Alma mater]]''}}

so that (1) the potential for an unsightly linewrap between "Alma" and "mater" is removed; (2) "Alma mater" has the usual loanword formatting (italics); and (3) it's linked in case a reader isn't familiar with what it means.

Thank you, 213.246.83.192 (talk) 13:08, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

I think using italics is wrong here. WP:ITALICS says that "loan words or phrases that have common use in English ... do not require italicization." It then suggests as a rule of thumb that words found in Merriam-Webster Online should not be italicized. The article Alma mater is terribly inconsistent in its use of italics and should be corrected; it also provides a link to http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alma+mater . As for {{Nowrap}}: I suggest that the construction of widely used templates avoid unnecessary use of templates which are only typing aids – a simple &nbsp; will have the same effect. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 13:38, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Nickname, not pen name

Latest comment: 10 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion

T. H. White was known to his friends as "Tim", even though his birth name was Terence. It's not appropriate to put "Tim" in either of |name= or |birth_name=, and |pseudonym=Tim renders as "pen name Tim", which is also not right. This template needs a |nickname= parameter, like that in {{Infobox person}}. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:00, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

OK, added. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:17, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Honorifics

Latest comment: 10 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

I've added |honorific_prefix= and |honorific_suffix= parameters, like those in {{Infobox person}} and many other biographical infoboxes. This improves data granularity. See Antonia Fraser for an example of them in use, and deploy them in articles you edit. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:21, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Forcing field bloat on us without consensus? I have no particular objection to the field, but you should have asked first. --Pi zero (talk) 17:13, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Embedding as a module

Latest comment: 10 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

A colleague has embedded this template in {{Infobox person}}, on Chris D.. As can be seen, that doesn't work properly, unlike the embedded {{infobox musical artist}}, directly above it in the infobox on that page.

Please can someone modify this infobox, to make it embeddable in the same manner? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:13, 29 March 2014 (UTC)

Adding mother and father as fields

Latest comment: 10 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion

Can we have fields for Mother and Father, instead of keeping them in relatives? --రహ్మానుద్దీన్ (talk) 03:35, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

What would be the advantages of this? I can see disadvantages: It's more fields when fewer would do, and because it's so specific it encourages including detailed information regardless of whether that information is significant. --Pi zero (talk) 13:07, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
We should at least have a "parents" field for the sake of consistency. If Template:Infobox person has parents, why shouldn't writers have the field as well? Little inconsistencies like this are really annoying. -Zanhe (talk) 02:41, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
Why should infobox person have the extra fields? It's just field bloat. They probably think they have some reason for it; generic infoboxes like that cultivate field bloat; but at least we don't have to make the mistake of spreading the bloat where it isn't needed. --Pi zero (talk) 14:26, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
Yep, these inconsistencies are annoying. It should be removed from infobox person. :) Garion96 (talk) 17:54, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
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