Forums:Infoboxes (again)

Tolkien Gateway > Council > Infoboxes (again)

I remember talking about this years ago, but it really bothers me that the infoboxes aren't uniform. Compare something like the dwarves infobox to the Númenórean one or even just the hobbit one and you can see there's a word of difference. I know there's obviously reasons why something like "preferred language" will never make it into the hobbit or dwarven ones, but I really think we should sort it out.

OK, so you might be thinking, "That's all well and good, if it bothers you so much, Mith, why don't you sort it out instead of posting about it?" and that's a fair point but to decide how to standardise the infoboxes there needs to be a consensus about how they should look.

Thoughts? --Mith (Talk/Contribs/Edits) 10:00, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Agree. There's some confusion between Royalty and Numenorean; Dwarves has hood color while it's only relevant for the Thorin and Co dwarves.

I think we need one general "character" infobox to avoid confusion. This should be in it at least:

• Name
• Race
• Other names
• Epithets
• Year of Birth
• (Place of Birth?)
• Year of Death
• (Place of Death?)
• Age at Death
• Affiliation
• Parentage
• Children
• Base/location

Thoughts? -- Ederchil ^{(Talk/Contribs/Edits)} 12:44, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

There's confusing between Númenórean, Royalty and Gondorian; at what point does someone stop being Númenórean and start being Gondorian/Arnorian? It's a judgement I'd rather not make, myself.

I don't know if we need a generic character one, maybe for men (although we already have an unglamorous one). I was more thinking about making sure similar information and formatting styles were applied across the board.

The problem's a result of different people doing things at different times. For instance I used the royalty infobox for Heirs of Isildur because I had no better one. There still isn't really, there's the rubbish men one, I suppose there's Númenórean but I would struggle to justify anyone beyond Eldacar as Númenórean.

I'm digressing somewhat. Essentially, I quite like having various infoboxes (I think the different colours provide much needed vibrancy to many pages) I just wish they had the same fields in them across the board. --Mith (Talk/Contribs/Edits) 17:34, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

EDIT: I've thought of just one example where a generic character template might be helpful: Bombadillo! --Mith (Talk/Contribs/Edits) 17:37, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Re: edit: The fact that old tom didn't have an infobox has frustrated me for some time, but since we don't know what he is, there's no infobox for him.

It's possible to use different colors on a standard infobox with the if# parser function. If race = noldor, bgcolor=lightblue, etc. It takes some coding, but isn't too hard. -- Ederchil ^{(Talk/Contribs/Edits)} 18:28, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

I think I like Ederchil's proposal. Maybe with addition of a further field of ‘other info’, which can be used to give info we want to give only for certain subcategories, as the hood colours for Thorin&co and the language preference for Númenóreans. Or possibly several fields of ‘other_info_title# ...’ and ‘other_info# ...’. I think this is the way to go. -- Mithrennaith 01:11, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps another idea would be something to state that the character is non-canon. --Pinkkeith 19:22, 18 February 2010 (UTC)