Template:Infobox too large/doc: Difference between revisions

Rationale for usage

This template flags articles which may contain an infobox with an overly indulgent amount of indiscriminate data or a superfluous quantity of imagery, making them excessively long or extremely wide, thus causing an infobox purpose or accessibility concerns, as outline below.

Protocols

Data

• MOS:INFOBOXPURPOSE – The purpose of an infobox is to summarize, but not supplant, the key facts that appear in an article. The less information that an infobox contains, the more effectively it serves its purpose, allowing readers to identify key facts at a glance.
• MOS:INFOBOXDESIGN – Creating overly long templates with a number of irrelevant fields is not recommended. How important is the field to the articles that will use the infobox? Is it summary information, or more extended detail that may be better placed within the body of an article?
• WP:UNDUE – Undue weight can be given in several ways, including but not limited to… the prominence of placement.
• MOS:SANDWICH – very long infoboxes may intrude into multiple subsections – Avoid sand­wich­ing text be­tween im­ages, in­fo­boxes, or sim­i­lar tem­pla­tes hor­i­zon­tally op­po­site each other.
• WP:NOTDATABASE – Statistics that lack context or explanation can reduce readability and may be confusing.
• WP:NOTDIRECTORY – Wikipedia is not a directory of everything in the universe that exists or has existed.

Imagery

• MOS:LEADIMAGE – Avoid lead images that readers would not expect to see there….lead images should be selected with care.
• WP:GALLERY – Wikipedia is not an image repository. A gallery is not a tool to shoehorn images into an article. Be aware different screen size and browsers may affect accessibility for some readers even with a well-crafted gallery.
• MOS:IMAGEREL – Not every article needs images, and too many can be distracting or cause undue weight: usually, less is more.
• WP:UNDUE – Undue weight can be given in several ways, including but not limited to the… use of imagery.
• MOS:INFOBOXUSE – Like navigation templates, infoboxes should generally not contain flag icons. For more information about flag icons, and exceptions to the general guideline, see MOS:FLAG.

Width

• MOS:INFOBOXSTYLE – Most infoboxes default width is 22em.
• WP:IMGSIZELEAD – The lead image in an infobox should generally not exceed the default size of the infobox. Therefore, it should be no wider than upright 0.9 (equivalent to 228px for most infoboxes, which use the default width of 22em).
• MOS:SANDWICH – Sand­wich­ing of text can al­so oc­cur when im­age size is set too high.

Advice

• Help:What infoboxes do – They quickly summarize important points in an easy-to-read format. However, they are not “statistics” tables in that they (generally) only summarize material from an article—the information should still be present in the main text
• Help:What should an infobox contain? – Infoboxes, like the introduction to the article, should primarily contain material that is expanded on and supported by citations to reliable sources elsewhere in the article.
• Help:What should an infobox not contain? – A common problem is including material in the infobox which is trivial and would not otherwise be included in the article body…Infobox templates should not be used for details that are too trivial to include in the article body (there are some exceptions, such as chemical properties)

Placement in articles

Examples:

Generic

{{Infobox too large|date=December 2025}}

Output:

With rationale

{{Infobox too large|reason=rationale for usage|date=December 2025}}

Output:

Categorization

See also

Arbitration decision about infoboxes

Templates

How to

Essays

Project

• This template contains a self-reference (it refers to Wikipedia in its contents).
• This template should not be substituted. Bots rely on the transcluded form for dating and categorisation.