Board Thread:New Features/@comment-24739709-20150518230347/@comment-24473195-20150916095153

Fandyllic wrote: Infoboxes should not be designed for their semantic fulfillment unless it serves the purpose of the infobox. I could see some situations where a slider/slideshow might do a better job of highlighting variants than a tabbed setup, especially when too many tabs gets kind of cumbersome.

Personally, I try to keep things simple unless complex is clearly superior. One can get caught up in bells and whistles. Agreed, I tend to prefer simplicity. From my perspective having a slider or tabber as the "default" image shows that the editors can't seem to find a single image that represents the article.

There are a couple of questions that editors should ask themselves when designing an infobox:


 * If the particular wiki article was stored in a regular book  or encyclopedia what image would one choose for it?
 * Is there too much content for the infobox?
 * Would one expect to find that amount of content in a "side note" of a regular book?
 * What guidelines should one use to design infoboxes?

The current state of affairs is that editors probably see infoboxes as kitchen sinks where anything can be thrown in. In wikipedia, an infobox  that uses a slider or tabber in the first item is probably uninformative and bad design especially because wikipedia's wikis are meant to be printable, but wikias are different it seems.