Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/Navbox

The following discussion is an archived proposal of the WikiProject below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the project's talk page (if created) or the WikiProject Council). No further edits should be made to this page.

The resulting WikiProject was not created

Wikipedia:WikiProject Navbox
Wikipedia:Navbox

Description[edit]

The purpose of this project is to identify all the articles lacking navboxes and to place one or more fitting navboxes in all Wikipedia article.

If there is an existing navbox where an article can be placed, it'll simply be added to the navbox and the navbox will be added to the page.

If there is no navbox where the article fits, other similar articles will be identified, and a new navbox would be created where all can fit together.

The advantage to having one or more navboxes on a page is that it provides instantaneous links and the article is not orphaned. Navboxes also have other benefits, such as enabling those reading an article to easily know about and find other articles they are interested in reading.

This study of a navbox has shown that in the month following its creation, readership of the articles contained within increased by 8.5% (an average of 406 views per article) and editing of these pages increased by 37%.

See this essay for more details. Sebwite (talk) 15:23, 3 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support[edit]

Sebwite (talk) 15:23, 3 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Andrew Gradman ^talk/_WP:Hornbook 17:58, 17 August 2009 (UTC) (I could support a navbox on almost every page.)[reply]

Discussion[edit]

Total oppose, at least to your stated purpose to "place one or more fitting navboxes in all Wikipedia articles". Navboxes are indeed sometimes useful; far more often, they're meaningless and ugly clutter. To take one random example, Category:Art museums and galleries in London contains 105 articles alone not including subcategories – a navbox encompassing every article on this topic would be bigger than most of the articles. – iride scent 17:00, 16 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia has a lot of stubs. Many articles on obscure topics do contain just a few lines. But that does not mean they will always be that way.

The navbox, if anything, is essential to these articles which it outsizes. The navbox enables these mini-articles to become known to many others who would otherwise not have known they existed, and therefore, contribute new additions to them.

I have seen quite a lot of articles that spent years as stubs grow rapidly once a navbox was added. Following this link, I have seen readership grow rapidly once a navbox is added to a page. Sebwite (talk) 05:40, 17 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I think you're missing my point. From what you're saying you want every article to have a navbox, and for most articles there is not, and never will be, an appropriate navbox. Clicking "random article" three times brings up Fatou's lemma, Hyphodermella corrugata, Edgel, Forum Against Islamophobia and Racism and Epic and Novel; none of these have an appropriate corresponding navbox, nor could a reasonable navbox be created – {{mathematical functions}}, {{plant pathogens}}, {{computer graphics terminology}}, {{British Islamic organisations}} and {{Russian literary criticism}} would each be the size of a phone book. I realize it's an unscientific study, but 5/5 is a 100% fail rate. – iride scent 15:05, 17 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I never said that there was any hurry to get a navbox on any page, or that any particular person would be responsible for getting this accomplished. All I am trying to say is that it should be a goal, just like de-orphaning every orphaned article is an eventual goal. Wikipedia is not finished and there is no deadline.

I am not familiar with every single topic in the whole wide world. Therefore, I am not capable of making navboxes for every article myself, including most of the ones you mentioned. But someone who is familiar with these and other related articles could be the one to create those navboxes. Sebwite (talk) 15:26, 17 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment, It's an ambitious and well-meaning proposal that would really help the Orphanage but a navbox on EVERY article is just unfeasible at this point and even in the foreseeable future, whereas with de-orphaning every article, it's more doable I think. In the long run, who knows? Maybe Wikipedia will grow to that size where there can be a useful navbox or topicbox on every article, and maybe that should be our goal, but I think that would be too far into the future, and starting a wikiproject on it now would be looking too far ahead, biting off more than you can chew in a sense. I would support a revised version of this project, maybe reworded to not included putting it "in all Wikipedia articles." I think you'll find you'll get a lot more supporters that way too. Or maybe you could just write an essay in project namespace about making it our goal to do this. In the meantime, I still maintain that the category system fulfills this role and is doing a fine job of it. -- OlEnglish ^(Talk) 01:43, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

One thing I have made clear throughout is that there is no deadline to have a navbox in every article, and there is no rush. What I do want people to know is that every article can have a navbox, and one of the goals for improving any article is to put a navbox in it. I have been writing an essay about it here. Sebwite (talk) 05:06, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I still see it as "cheating" in a way, because technically you're only linking the article to the navbox template, and in fact when you click on "What links here" all it shows is the template name of the navbox, not a long list of all the articles it links to. I guess I prefer doing it the more "purer" way of actually trying to link an article by incorporating it someway in-text relevantly to another article in the process expanding that article and improving Wikipedia as a whole. -- OlEnglish ^(Talk) 06:03, 4 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Strike that, it actually does show the other article links the template is place on. But still you run the risk of the WP:Walled garden scenario with only using navboxes to interlink between articles. -- œ ^™ 03:25, 18 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

comment You know, good arguments have been made against having Navboxes on every page -- the proposal has met the usual fate of most proposals containing the word "every". But what about scaling back the ambitions -- e.g. an at-large WikiProject and/or task force to spread awareness of the stupendous powers of Navboxes, and to spread recognition that they should be used more frequently. Casting a cursory (non-critical) glance at WP:Navbox#Advantages, they sure are versatile little buggers. PS I found this page through the essay on the {{Essays on building Wikipedia}} template -- at the very least, you have to admit that navboxes are amazing. Andrew Gradman ^talk/_WP:Hornbook 04:15, 18 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the project's talk page (if created) or at the WikiProject Council). No further edits should be made to this page.