Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Infoboxes

Placement of infobox titles (take two)

This thread is a revival of previous discussion: Concerning the preferred placement of titles of infoboxes (above or inside the rectangular borders of the infobox), it was stated that:

Furthermore, while the semantic benefits may not be clear to sighted readers, they are clear to other consumers Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 01:15, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

In digging into this further, it appears that the semantic benefit of placing the title above the box when using assistive technologies may be over stated or even in some cases non-existent.

For example from Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Archive_115#Infobox_headings:

"As a user of the screen reader JAWS, I don't care which one [title above or inside] is used, so long as at least one of them is used and if both are used at the same time, they provide complementary information." Graham87 14:20, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

In addition, when I turn on Universal Access in the Safari web browser, when the title of an infobox is placed inside the infobox, what is spoken is "column 1 of 12, row 1, <title of infobox>". When the title is placed above the infobox, the title is skipped over and not even read (while everything else on the web page is read including what is around and inside the infobox). I don't know if this is a bug in Universal Access, but if a sight impaired consumer uses the present implementation of Universal Access, placing the title above the infobox is a decided disadvantage.

Finally for all consumers (both sighted and sight impaired), consistency of the layout of infoboxes is an advantage. When a large majority of infoboxes place the title inside the box, seeing one outside the box jarring and doesn't look right. The same applies to a non-sighted consumers. If a non-sighted consumer is used to hearing titles presented as "column 1 of n, row 1", from experience that consumer will know and expect that the title will be presented that way. Boghog (talk) 08:27, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

Proposal

I've opened a section here about adding to the MoS that infoboxes are optional, and that where no consensus can be reached we defer to the first major contributor, per WP:STYLEVAR. Leaving this note for anyone watching this page but not that one. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 20:06, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

It might make more sense to have that information centralized here, with all the other stuff about infoboxes, rather than adding it to the main MOS page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:36, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Proposal: No Italics for Chinese

Some fields, such as book title in Template:Infobox book, use italics font. However italics font is bad at least for Chinese. I hope there is a way to avoid italics font when it comes to Chinese.114.25.189.86 (talk) 03:24, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

As documented at {{infobox book}}, you should set |italic title=no when italicisation of the book title is inappropriate. The general case of italicisation of Chinese text is covered at MOS:Ety so should not need to also be dealt with at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Infoboxes. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:14, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Request for comments - Nick Drake

Hello,

you are invited to participate at this discussion. Regards.--Tomcat (7) 13:25, 11 October 2012 (UTC)