Forum:Character infoboxes

Hello. I'm sure some of you have noticed by now that we are currently using 30+ infoboxes for use on character pages. The only difference in the templates being the theme that the template is using.

Not only does this lead to confusion for new users as to which infobox to use on which character, but it also may result in extra maintenance work for the users here.

Say we were to add a new section to character infoboxes, "Favourite sweet" for example. This would mean that a user would have to go through and add the new section. If it took 10 seconds for a user to load the template, add the new section and save the page it would currently take them around 5 minutes to make the change on all of the templates. Why should we take this much time to make such a small change to the infoboxes?

Luckily we don't have to. If you take a look at my portable infoboxes testing wiki you can see that I've set up one template (Template:Individual infobox) to use on all character pages (Minerva McGonagall and Albus Dumbledore).

This template determines which theme to display by searching the |theme= parameter. Entering a value, hogwarts-staff or phoenix for example, will cause the appropriate theme to be displayed.

This will heavily cut down on maintenance work. Instead of pushing all changes to each separate infobox we will be able to make the change in one place.

Migrating to this new convention, however, will require that we edit our character pages (by use of bot) to use the new infobox.

What are your opinions? Any questions?

Cheers,

-- Cörey (talk) 21:08, October 24, 2016 (UTC)