Template talk:Infobox Philosopher

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is part of the Philosophy WikiProject, an attempt at creating a standardised, informative, comprehensive and easy-to-use Philosophy resource. Please read the instructions and standards for writing and maintaining philosophy articles.

Contents 1 Proposed Improvements 2 Downhill again? 3 Caption styling 4 Name, twice? 5 Some changes 6 Reduce Size Of Infobox

[edit] Proposed Improvements

I'm going to try to reduce the size of this template by taking out at least major works and quote. I'll make sure that this information is not lost, but is moved somewhere else in the article. Also, I might attempt to make this look aesthetically better.

If you have any comments or suggestions please leave them here. Thanks!

Also, User:Silence has made some great suggestions that are on his talk page. I'm copying them here so I'll be able to work from them easier:

1. Too big.
2. Largely redundant. Most of the information can be easily gained from the passage of the article, and repeating it in a giant template is a poor use of space. And if any of the information isn't included somewhere in the article already, it certainly should be!
3. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a baseball card set. Template use is discouraged, just as lists and other fancy non-textual things are discouraged, whenever a viable alternative is possible with just normal articles. Although there are many cases where templates are a big help to an article, in most cases, simpler is better.
4. It's stylistically similar to a template I hate (though I won't oppose its use in every article, just the ones where the alternative is clearly better): the Biography template. In some ways its better, since it provides much more important information, but in other ways its worse, because it takes up ten times as much space.
5. I don't mind "School", "Main Interests", "Influences", and "Influenced" much, because they're very interesting and compact ways to summarize how the philosopher fits into the philosophical tradition in general. Honestly, I'm actually a bit tickled by those tidbits of data; they're pretty awesome, whether they're true or not. :) However, remember that many of these things are highly disputable, which is another of the main reasons to avoid providing so much information in a template: it makes it impossible to easily cite sources (and even if you do, it just makes the template ugly and cluttered), and sources are vital to maintain Wiki:NPOV. This is the entire reason Wikipedia uses articles instead of just giant templates of facts in ordered rows: because so many things are disputable, and almost as many are disputed! Putting information in an infobox makes it sound like Wikipedia is stating that these are facts. And often, they aren't. This is a very big problem. Though it's not one I'll focus on, because I'm much more interested in aesthetic and utilitarian concerns than in political correctness. But I bring it up because most other people would, and so you can keep it in mind. Also remember that trying to avoid stating anything controversial in a template is not a solution, but the first steps to another, equally problematic situation: one where a template sacrifices meaning and interesting information for avoiding stepping on anyone's toes, sterilizing and draining the life out of those little boxes of data. In some ways, that's even worse than having a somewhat disputable template. The easiest solution? Just don't use infoboxes for this stuff!
6. "Quote". If I was to pick one piece of the template to remove (aside from "Philosophers By Era", I'll discuss that below), it'd probably be this one. Long ago a firm consensus was reached that Wikipedia would not pick out quotes to head up each article with. Fun as doing so may be, it's decidedly and without a doubt not encyclopedic to remove someone's words from context and put them up as though they represent a man's entire belief system, when people clearly change their beliefs from year to year, clearly have more depth than all that, and when so often interpretations of quotes are heavily disputed and thus require context and explanation to be at all meaningful—especially philosopher quotations! The entire "quotations" issue is a huge can of worms which was long ago resolved by the creation if WikiQuotes, which was specifically created because of this problem, as a repository for quotations that would give a much fuller view of a person's famous philosophies by not putting them completely out of context (though anything less than WikiSource does that to some extent). Wikipedia needs to continue this trend of moving away from out-of-context quotations as much as possible, not backtrack and include even more quotations. In my view, the only time when quotations are appropriate for any article is when they're part of the article text and being used to explain some view or other significant detail, not when they're just laid out there on their own, though if it's as part of a "Quotes" section or similar I'll tend to leave it alone since it's not completely distinct, even though, really, I should be attacking even those sections and fighting to get them moved to WikiQuote, to minimize the redundancy. Again, Wikipedia is not a baseball card set: it does not need a catchphrase for its articles.
7. "Famous ideas". If I was to pick two pieces of the template to remove, this would be one of them—in fact, I might even remove this one if I could only choose one to remove, just because it has even more potential for abuse than the "Quotes" idea, by not even attempting to use his worsd against him, but rather using attempts to summarize paraphrasings of his general ideas! Do I even have to explain why it's not acceptable to say "these were Nietzsche's famous ideas"? Many of Nietzsche's "most famous ideas" weren't his ideas at all, but were inspired by misinterpretations of what he said; mentioning this ideas in the article is perfectly fine, because there they can be given their proper context. But just listing them as though they were fact is not OK. Likewise, many of his most important ideas are not his "most famous" ones at all! Wikipedia should not be a place to repeat old quotes and mistaken assumptions about philosophers, but a place to get actual reliable information on them. Moreover, arguably most damningly of all, if these are an accurate, informative, and highly significant summary or excerpt of a philosopher's views, why not just put them in the opening paragraphs of the article? As with much of the rest of the template, redundancy is a big problem here, and with this row there's also the great problem of controversy and, like the quote one, out-of-context problems. Most philosophers simply can't in any way be understood without at least a few paragraphs explaining the context and details of their views. One line simply will not do. And thankfully, it doesn't have to: we have a whole article to put all this information in. So let me ask you:
8. Don't you think it's possible that one of the reasons the Nietzsche article is currently so lacking is because people have spent so much time and energy and thought debating and working on a ridiculously huge template for it, rather than working on the article text? Not to simplify a long, complex edit history and an article with a variety of long-standing issues, but just think about it. This massive, brightly-colored, all-consuming template, appealing though it may be, seems to have a decidedly negative effect on its articles, not only on its readers, but also, possibly, on its editors.
9. "Major Works" takes up too much space, and any author should already have a "Major Works" section on his page with a more complete and less cluttered list of such things. If I was to pick three rows to remove from this template, this would be the third row, after "Famous ideas" and "quote". After those three parts of the template, my main objections are with the template as a whole, not with any specific aspect of it, so removing them (or just removing "Quote" and "Famous idea" and shortening "Major Works", if you prefer) would probably be the easiest way to satisfy my concerns, next to simply deleting the template entirely—which would probably, in the end, be best, though I feel bad for the hard work you've clearly put into it. It's simply not a Wikipedia-ish template. And there's another problem with simply listing a bunch of major works at the very top of the article, before having explained what any of them mean:
10. What will any of them mean to a new reader of the article? Remember that articles should be designed to help people who have never read anything about these people before. How does listing a bunch of mere names of fellow philosophers, philosophical texts, and philosophical movements tell anyone anything about Nietzsche except people who already know plenty about Nietzsche, and who thus, ironically, are the ones who need this article the least! Wikipedia policy is to assume ignorant readers as much as possible in general-interest articles, and such assumptions are probably far from baseless in many cases. Read up on Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles#State the obvious if you haven't already, and reconsider what information a person who knows none of these terms would actually want at the top of biographocai articles like the ones about western philosophers. Sure, I'm a huge fan of the compact and fascinating list of movements and philosophers and all that, but this article isn't being written for me, it's being written for people who have at best only heard the name "Nietzsche" in passing and want to understand the guy's life! A template like this runs directly contrary to that goal. It's written for philosophers, not for the general public, and that's not a good thing.
11. Inconsistent with the style of all other types of articles. A relatively minor problem, since editors are not discouraged from experimenting with layout and trying to improve article formats or keep things fresh. However, it's important to keep in mind that many people coming to an article that uses this template for the first time will be very surprised by such a massive template immediately confronting them, and I'd say at least some of them will actually be scared off from reading the article by just how huge and complicated it is. Which brings me to the next problem:
12. Templates work best when they're small and compact, even if that means subdividing one templates into multiple templates so readers don't get overwhelmed. The exact same principle holds true for articles: the ideal article is moderate-sized, not large, because too much of anything will unbalance a page and look terrible and crowded, not giving the article room to breathe and flow naturally and smoothly, as all articles should. A clean, minimalistic article is calming, informative, zen, crisp and clean and refreshing as a mountain spring. An article packed with images or templates is eccentric, rushed, jumbled and chaotic, zipping back and forth and mashing things together in its explosive rush to present too much information too quickly and in too many different ways. And an article with no images or templates at all (or very few) is dry, slow, boring all but the most dedicated people to sleep. So we should both avoid completely stale articles, and also avoid articles that overdo it with the gimmicks, since both will drive away readers by the thousands. As in life, moderation is virtue.
13. I don't like "Philosophers by era". It doesn't add anything to the template, and belongs more in the articles about movements than the articles about philosophers. For anyone who wants to see that stuff, you should just link to "Western Philosophy" at the top of the template, by which someone can reach History of Western philosophy. Cut it off.
14. A minor objection: Why so much capitalization? Why "Place of Birth" instead of "Place of birth", "Philosophers By Era" instead of "Philosophers by era" (or at the very least "Philosophers by Era")? Just as article titles aren't capitalized if they wouldn't be capitalized in normal conversation, so are entries in a table or infobox almost never capitalized unnaturally. Also, a related minor objection: why aren't the written works italicized?
15. An objection I also have with the infamous biography template: why mention when he was born and died, or where he was born and died, when most of that is already mentioned at the very top of the article—in other words, a few inches to the left of the information you're giving is the exact same information! This is a crippling problem with this entire template format: it's supremely, nauseatingly redundant. Furthermore: is it really important for us to have drilled into our heads when and where these people died? Who cares if the guy was born in Saxonry or in Saarland, whether he died in August 25th or August 26th? What difference does it make? Not only is this painfully redundant, but it's also useless, telling us nothing of value whatsoever about the actual person, his views, his life, reactions to his beliefs, nothing! That's why I'll never give up fighting the bio template. But that's a long-term battle, clearly, since it has so much support; this should be a short-term battle, because it's much more clearly a major issue with articles to have such monstropolous templates looming monolithically over a series of extremely important articles on Wikipedia.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to come see me when you found out I had an issue with this. Many people would have reacted much more aggressively, so I'm impressed that you actually messaged me to see what I thought after my less-than-diplomatic criticisms, just as I'm impressed that you came up with a template with so many potential uses, even though I don't think that Wikipedia is quite the place for it. :) -Silence 00:22, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

--FranksValli 05:25, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Downhill again?

Looking at the template on Friedrich Nietzsche again, it looks like this template's gotten quite ugly and redundant again, somewhere along the line. Its thinness is nonstandard and very unappealing, its Name, Birth, Death, and School/tradition sections are all redundant (or should be) to the opening paragraph of the article, and its "Notable Ideas" section is again useless without the proper context that a Wikipedia article requires: articles are written for people who don't already know anything about Nietzsche, not for the kind of people who'd gain any useful information from catchphrases like "Eternal Recurrence", "Will to Power", "Overman". I was (relatively) very happy with how this template was shaping up a few weeks ago, but now, again, it seems like the Western Philosopher articles would all become a great deal better if it was simply removed from them all and the article text was used to provide all of that information, as it should be. -Silence 03:52, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Do what you guys want with it.. I'm gonna try to phase out of Wikipedia, mostly due to the vandals. --FranksValli 08:46, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Caption styling

I’ve adjusted the line-height for the picture caption to suit the smaller font-size; I’ve also changed the <span> to a <div> and added a little padding above and below. See Thomas_Aquinas for a multi-line caption that exhibits the adjusted line-height. —Goclenius 01:24, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Cool, nice work. FranksValli 02:23, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Name, twice?

Since the name is the caption to the box (let alone the title of the article), isn't a distinct name field redundant?TheGrappler 22:29, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

Yeah I see what you mean. I would support removing it if you really want. FranksValli 00:30, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Anything that makes it more concise is good! TheGrappler 04:46, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Some changes

I removed the obviously redundant naming to the one with "Name: ..." in the template and increased the width of the template because it was too narrow. I hope this helps.Non-vandal 05:08, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Reduce Size Of Infobox

JA: I'm getting really fed up with not being able to read the leads of articles on major philosophers when I try to refer to them. If the template maker cannot figure out how to make the column width adjustable, or at the very least keep it under 250px, then I will very soon propose this template for deletion. Thanks, Jon Awbrey 16:12, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Don't hesitate to propose it for deletion right now if that's your intent. However the size of the box can be adjusted. Non-vandal has recently increased the width - I've reduced it a bit to compensate. FranksValli 07:14, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

JA: I think that you should look at something like Template:Platonism, that takes up a non-obtrusive 175px of column width. Maybe the sort of info that you want to include could be done with a bold head for each topic followed by an indented line of items under each head. Jon Awbrey 02:52, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll look into it. FranksValli 04:29, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Bold text