User blog comment:BioChimes/Red Info Box/@comment-1536954-20150325094433

To standardise infoboxes wiki-wide we have simplified the generic Template:Infobox to make it a miscellaneous infobox. The red box is a means to phase into a primary usage of Specialised Infoboxes as the new all-purpose family of information boxes, and is essentially a last resort in response to the inability for the community to organically adopt them, which resulted in many problems.

The point of an infobox is to quickly and effectively summarise the information on a page, working in conjunction with an introductory paragraph, i.e. the box detailing the statistics (answering "who/what?" "what faction?" "how many?" "where from?" "how old?" "what's a basic visual example?", etc) whilst the introduction establishes an anecdotal base for the article in question, answering the more demanding questions like "What do they stand for?" "What is their reputation and relevance?", "Why where they created?", "What has their history shown?", etc.

This is more effectively achieved if all infobox types utilise a standard, across-the-board set of parameters that can be easily used and easily identified. If it's a chapter, the space marine chapter infobox has everything preset and ready to go: colours, badge, primarch, warcry, numbers, homeworld, etc etc. If it's something else, there's a special box for it too, complete with all its basic, core facts. It's just a good ethos in regard to the sorting of information if things are designed especially so that readers will always know to expect identical frameworks for every type of article they read. Additionally, speaking from experience in the industry, this is a fundamental teaching of modern information architecture, for obvious reasons.

The user input based infobox is and has been ineffective at this. Although some ad-hoc orthodoxy has occurred with infobox sections across the wiki, these have often used non-standard and varying row heading titles (including different titles for similar statistics on similar pages). Row headings for these infoboxes are also very commonly in random orders, whilst the specialised infoboxes have additional headings for each category of information within the infobox, with the relevant rows grouped below each one. Additionally, many infoboxes have been used in ineffective ways, detailing things that shouldn't really be summarised in such inefficient ways. "Chapter respect" is one recent example. Another point to make is that with specialised infoboxes, the need for infobox sections to detail "faction type" is no longer needed.