Template talk:Character Infobox

Revamp
This infobox requires a bit of work to be properly informative, as its name suggests. My suggestions:


 * Get rid of birth and death dates, status, height, hair and eye colour.
 * Revamp it so that it includes:
 * Name
 * Character mugshot
 * Games he appears in/is mentioned in
 * Voice actor
 * Gender
 * Nationality
 * Augmentations
 * Family
 * Affiliation
 * Ranks held
 * Weapons used

As it currently is, it's uninformative and cumbersome :(. http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/fallout/images/0/08/Personal_Sig_Image.gif Tagaziel (call!) 18:19, January 21, 2011 (UTC)


 * Hello Mikael ;) ! For your suggestions, for hair and eyes is better to keep them, they are more important than most other universe because some character is augmented and therefore their eyes change. For birth dates, for important characters like JC Denton and death dates for historical characters like Adam Weishaupt. For status and height I agree, they're useless. Itachou [~talk~] 00:25, January 22, 2011 (UTC)

Look at the size of this thing!
The infoboxes have become ridiculously large and unwieldy. Most of the time information the infobox tries to convey would be better given inside the article (and guess what, it usually is). Please see Manual of Style on Wikipedia to see the intended use of infoboxes. Now look at Paul Denton:
 * Date of death is unnecessary. Whether he dies or not depends on the player; "possibly this or that" is just an expression of lack of knowledge, which is the opposite of what the infobox is supposed to do
 * Hair and eye color are usually unnecessary, because the only source on them is the mugshot - something the readers can inspect themselves; it's just a waste of space
 * Weapons take too much space and are too variable; there's nothing preventing the character from simply taking another weapon
 * Current status - unknown, pfft... There are some other questions, like when is "current". What happens to the character is better explained inside the article
 * Notable facts are just a trashcan; pretty much anything can go in there. A much better place for a quick summary in the introductory section of the article
 * Augmentations, "bioluminescent cells", "subdermal pigmentation"... which means? Actual Augmentations the character uses might be useful if we had authoritative sources on them.
 * Family and Acquaintances, they don't give enough information to be useful and take too much space if expanded

What I think may stay:
 * Name
 * Image (why not several switchable pictures showing the character in different games, like in Homeworld wiki?)
 * Nationality/ethnicity - very simple datum that nevertheless provides some important insight into the character
 * Date of birth (if known) - it places the character in the timeline and gives a hint on his or her age in every game
 * Appearances (simple mentions of the character should be used sparingly so they don't clog the list)
 * Affiliation - it practically supersedes the Acquaintances section
 * Voice actor - useful and it's the only place where it can be conveniently fitted.

Please discuss. --Nathan2000 (talk) 11:25, May 25, 2015 (UTC)


 * I think they're a bit over the top too, especially when it comes to the "Physical description" section. An augmentations sub-section can be put into articles of characters with known augmentations like on Adam Jensen's page. The list in his infobox is really excessive and would probably be better placed within the article itself.


 * I'm not sure how useful the titles such as "Biographical information" etc are. If one of these sections is empty such as on this page the title still appears even if there's no subheadings, which looks really dumb.


 * Since they basically give the same information, there isn't a need for both a "status" and "Date of death" section. It might be worthwhile keeping one of these but there's also the problem that knowing a character is dead is a pretty big spoiler to be right at the top of an article. The "Rank" heading is either normally not used at all or more or less overlaps with the "Affiliation" section so that can be removed aswell. From DeusEx.com, we know the height, weight and blood type of a fair few Human Revolution characters. Even though this sort of info is best suited to the infobox, it doesn't seem important enough to be included in it. It might be difficult to integrate into the article itself so will probably end up in the trivia section unless anyone has a better suggestion.


 * I'm in agreeance with your revised list, and also think the section titles (e.g. "Chronological and political information") should be removed; especially considering there would be significantly less subsections under each title. Edit: having multiple images for the different games a character appears in is a cool idea. One drawback is that it doesn't work very well on mobile (both/all images are displayed one after the other rather than being tabbed) but I might experiment with it when I have time. Iwantacallisto (talk) 12:55, May 26, 2015 (UTC)


 * I've learned two things today. The first: the old infoboxes were spaghetti code that is impossible to maintain. The second: Wikia is making some new system that makes infoboxes easier to make and tidier, although at the moment the options are somewhat limited. It's automatically styles together with the site, but can be further customized with CSS. I need to see if it's possible to make it show weapon upgrades the way our infoboxes do.


 * Oh, nice! Yeah I saw the post on community central about that. It'd probably be a good idea to start changing over some of the infoboxes now. Having just two headings seems to work well and I think it's a good idea that you've split the in-universe info from the real world info. The default colour scheme actually doesn't look too bad but that can obviously be modified later anyway. I have a feeling that trying to add more than one image to this infobox might be more difficult than for the old one but we can try it at least.Iwantacallisto (talk) 23:44, May 26, 2015 (UTC)


 * I like the new infoboxes! I think the old 2-column layout has too little horizontal space for the text.
 * Got a question about the "Birth date" row. For deceased characters like Namir or Barrett, should we maybe use something like "life years" (or whatever the term is), I mean 1992-2027? Sugarhoney (talk) 19:52, June 2, 2015 (UTC)


 * That's a good idea Sugarhoney since it combines the birth and death year into one section. How does "lifetime" sound as a title? That's the only thing I can think of but there might be better alternatives. Iwantacallisto (talk) 14:19, June 3, 2015 (UTC)


 * I don't mind how it's called as long as it has two dates. That said, "lifetime" sounds more like a duration ("80 years") rather than a discrete date range. I like "Lived: ...-..." (example), but it's somewhat odd to use past tense to refer to future dates. Note: I'm not a native speaker. Sugarhoney (talk) 09:59, June 8, 2015 (UTC)

I'm generally averse to death dates on characters that are very much alive in their games. The Tyrants maybe aren't so problematic, since their death is canonical, but please avoid "Status: Optional" or "possibly 2052" in the infoboxes.--Nathan2000 (talk) 11:18, June 8, 2015 (UTC)