Wikipedia talk:Too many boxes

Hard working, loyal Boxers

They do serve a useful purpose for certain genre statistics. More generally, they preserve a style across multiple articles, linking them together, and making it easier to find things. For a battle, you can quickly and easily find who participated on each side, and the numbers, information that might otherwise take quite a while of digging through article text. Compare French and Indian War which has an infobox with Cherokee–American wars which doesn't. For a person, you can similarly find important facts, locations, and dates. Compare Robert Monckton which has an infobox with Charles Lawrence which doesn't. --AnonEMouse ^(squeak) 21:15, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

SOrry about messing the page up, trying to work out how to do info boces on wikimedia —Preceding unsigned comment added by Plybjsds (talk • contribs) 11:47, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Why?

Why is the THUS USER THINKS BOXES SHOULD BURN IN HELL in a box?

munchman | talk; 12:50, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Also, it complains about infoboxes. What is wrong with them? Besides, this page has an infobox.pluma Ø 01:31, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

Hello, Munchman and Pluma. It is always good to hear from you. "What is wrong with them?" Just click the "Project Page" link and you will be taken to a page that explains what is wrong with "Too many boxes." "Besides, this page has an infobox." Yes; that is humor. I think having a box on a page that complains about boxes is rather cute, but of course, to each his or her own. Sincerely, GeorgeLouis (talk) 03:44, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

uh oh

the computer screen is a box, the components are almost universally boxlike (cpu anyone?). face it, the war is over, the boxes won, and i for one welcome our new infobox overlords.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 05:57, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

box life cyle

"infoboxes" and "navigation boxes" are creations of users who do not so much enjoy compiling encyclopedic content, but to arrange such content as they find. These people are a very important asset to Wikipedia, and part of Wikipedia's secret of success ("expert-based" projects like Citizendium don't really lift off because the experts want to spend their time writing great articles, and cannot be bothered to tackle the huge maintenance tasks an encyclopedia project demands).

So, while the impetus that gets us this box overkill is actually a valuable resource to Wikipedia, it will betide undesirable results if left unchecked. But there is a self-regulating aspect to this as well. People creating these boxes want them to be seen: they spend their time on something they think is neat, and they want it to be as visible as possible. But what happens when too many people compile too many boxes is, the individual box will be lost in an unsightly clutter of other boxes. At some point, some editor will come along and try to clean up the pate, and while the box-makers won't bear their box being removed, they have to suffer the numerous boxes being collapsed.

This is done by {{Navboxes}}, a box of boxes, and the end result of all this is that the page loaded into the browser contains a huge overhead of "navigation boxes", but what the user ends up seeing is no box.

Of course it would be nicer to have one box that is well designed and actually (gasp) useful to the reader than a huge clutter of useless boxes that are hidden from view and thus do not do any harm, but at least the hiding of the boxes will curb the impetus to create even more boxes. --dab (𒁳) 10:12, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

I stole your graphic . . .

. . . and put it on my page with just two changes. User:GeorgeLouis#Background_and_peccadillos. Sincerely, GeorgeLouis (talk) 03:02, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

What about the Sandbox???

surely it can't be evil as well??--203.100.0.82 (talk) 22:42, 4 May 2014 (UTC)