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Infobox

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For information about infoboxes on Wikipedia, seeHelp:Infobox.
A real-life infobox fromBritish Rail Class 43car 43185 operated byFirst Great Western

Aninfoboxis a digital or physicaltableused to collect and present a subset of information about its subject, such as adocument.It is astructured documentcontaining a set ofattribute–value pairs,[1]and inWikipediarepresents a summary of information about the subject of anarticle.[2]In this way, they are comparable to datatablesin some aspects. When presented within the larger document it summarizes, an infobox is often presented in asidebarformat.

An infobox may be implemented in another document bytranscludingit into that document and specifying some or all of the attribute–value pairs associated with that infobox, known asparameterization.

Wikipedia

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An infobox may be used to summarize the information of an article onWikipedia.[3]They are used on similar articles to ensure consistency of presentation by using a common format.[4][2]Originally, infoboxes (and templates in general) were used forpage layoutpurposes.[2]An infobox may be transcluded into an article by specifying thevaluefor some or all of itsparameters.[5]The parameter name used must be the same as that specified in the infobox template, but any value may be associated to it.[5]The name isdelimitedfrom the value by anequals sign.[5]The parameter name may be regarded as an attribute of the article's subject.[6] 

{{Infobox prepared food
|name=
|image=
|image_size=
|caption=
|alternate_name=
|country=
|region=
|creator=
|course=
|type=
|served=
|main_ingredient=
|variations=
|calories=
|other=
}}

{{Infobox prepared food
|name=Crostata
|image=Crostata limone e zenzero 3.jpg
|image_size=
|caption=Crostata with lemon ginger filling
|alternate_name=
|country=[[Italy]]
|region=[[Lombardia]]
|creator=
|course=[[Dessert]]
|type=[[Tart]]
|served=
|main_ingredient=Pastry crust,[[jam]]or[[ricotta]],fruit
|variations=''Crostata di frutta'',''crostata di ricotta'',many other sweet or savoury variations
|calories=
|other=
}}
The infoboxInfobox prepared foodused on Wikipedia food-related articles, with novaluesspecified for itsparameters(attributes). The same infobox as implemented in the articlecrostata.Values are to the right of theequals sign(=), and that the parameter names are the same as those in the specification for the infobox template. The values are inwiki markup:entries enclosed in square brackets (e.g. [[Tart]]) will be rendered as a link to the respective Wikipedia article (e.g.Tart), and the linked file will be transcluded into the article in place of its markup.
The infobox for the Wikipedia articleCrostatarendered by aweb browser engineon adesktop computer

On Wikipedia, an infobox is transcluded into an article by enclosing its name and attribute–value pairs within a double set ofbraces.TheMediaWikisoftware on which Wikipedia operates thenparsesthe document, for which the infobox and other templates are processed by atemplate processor.This is atemplate enginewhich produces aweb documentand astyle sheetused for presentation of the document. This enables the design of the infobox to be separated from the content it manipulates;[2]that is, the design of the template may be updated without affecting the information within it, and the new design will automatically propagate to all articles that transclude the infobox.[4]Usually, infoboxes areformattedto appear in the top-right corner of a Wikipedia article in the desktop view,[3]or at the top in the mobile view.

Placement of an infobox within thewikitextof an article is important foraccessibility.[7]Abest practiceis to place them followingdisambiguationtemplates (those that direct readers to articles about topics with similar names) and maintenance templates (such as that marking an article as unreferenced), but before all othercontent.[8][9]

Baeza-Yatesand King say that some editors find templates such as infoboxes complicated,[10]as the template may hide text about a property or resource that the editor wishes to change; this is exacerbated by chained templates, that is templates transcluded within other templates.[10]

As of August 2009, English Wikipedia used about 3,000 infobox templates that collectively used more than 20,000 attributes.[11]Since then, many have been merged, to reduce redundancy. As of June 2013, there were at least 1,345,446 transclusions of the parentInfobox template,[12]used by some, but not all, infoboxes, on 4,251,127 articles.

The name of an Infobox is typically "Infobox [genre]"; however, widely used infoboxes may be assigned shorter names, such as "taxobox" for taxonomy.[8]

Machine learning

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About 44.2% of Wikipedia articles contained an infobox in 2008,[13]and about 33% in 2010.[14]Automatedsemantic knowledge extractionusingmachine learningalgorithms is used to "extract machine-processable information at a relatively low complexity cost".[1]However, the low coverage makes it more difficult, though this can be partially overcome by complementing article data with that incategoriesin which the article is included.[13]TheFrench Wikipediainitiated the projectInfobox Version 2in May 2011.[15][16]

Knowledge obtained by machine learning can be used to improve an article, such as by using automated software suggestions to editors for adding infobox data.[13]The iPopulator project created a system to add a value to an article's infobox parameter via an automated parsing of the text of that article.[11]

DBpediausesstructured contentextracted from infoboxes[2]by machine learning algorithms to create a resource oflinked datain theSemantic Web;it has been described byTim Berners-Leeas "one of the more famous" components of the linked data project.[17]

Machine extraction creates a triple consisting of a subject, predicate or relation, and object.[1]Each attribute-value pair of the infobox is used to create anRDFstatement using anontology.[18]This is facilated by the narrower gap between Wikipedia and an ontology than exists between unstructured or free text and an ontology.[19]

Thesemantic relationshipbetween the subject and object is established by the predicate.[1]In the example infobox, the triple ( "crostata", type, "tart" ) indicates that acrostatais a type oftart.The article's topic is used as the subject, the parameter name is used as the predicate, and the parameter's value as the object.[18][1]Each type of infobox is mapped to an ontology class, and each property (parameter) within an infobox is mapped to an ontology property.[20]These mappings are used when parsing a Wikipedia article to extract data.

Metadata

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Screenshot of a Link to this article posting into Microsoft's application teams
Link to this article posting into Microsoft Teams and the application using the metadata from the infobox to make the link fuller by adding an image and summary text

By presenting the basic facts of an article within an infobox, also allows the facts to be presented in a machine-friendly way allowing extra functionality such as when a link to a wikipedia is pasted into a compatible program, instead of just the link itself being posted other information such as the articles image is posted too.

Citations

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  1. ^abcdeBaeza-Yates & King 2009,p. 31.
  2. ^abcdeLiyang 2011,p. 385.
  3. ^abBroughton 2008,p. 357.
  4. ^abBroughton 2008,p. 17.
  5. ^abcBroughton 2008,p. 18.
  6. ^Baeza-Yates & King 2009,p. 30.
  7. ^Broughton 2008,p. 234.
  8. ^abBroughton 2008,p. 235.
  9. ^TheEnglish Wikipediapolicy about accessibility is specified in theWikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility.The policy aboutwikitextlayout is specified atWikipedia:Manual of Style/LayoutandWikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section.
  10. ^abBaeza-Yates & King 2009,p. 345.
  11. ^abLange, Böhm & Naumann 2010,p. 7.
  12. ^"Jarry1250's Toolserver Tools - Template transclusion count".List of Wikimedia projects.7 June 2013.Retrieved7 June2013.
  13. ^abcBaeza-Yates & King 2009,p. 28.
  14. ^Lange, Böhm & Naumann 2010,p. 5.
  15. ^Geertman, Reinhardt & Toppen 2011,p. 493.
  16. ^The project is hosted on theFrench WikipediapageInfobox/V2.
  17. ^Miller 2008.
  18. ^abLiyang 2011,p. 387.
  19. ^Virvou & Matsuura 2012,p. 315.
  20. ^Liyang 2011,p. 395.

Works cited

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Further reading

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