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When I retire I'm going to spend my evenings by the fireplace going through those boxes. There are things in there that ought to be burned.
The basic thesis is that Wikipedia has too many boxes. Userboxes were bad enough, but now we have the infobox virus, and dozens of superfluous navigation boxes spouting up all over otherwise decent articles. We have a multitude of boxes on talk pages claiming ownership by some project that typically has contributed nothing to that article, except of course the box. We have boxes appearing at the top of an article to warn us of 1004 different things.
Enough is enough. No more boxes. The fightback starts here.
Be Free. Think outside the Box
Testimonials
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As a wikinewbie, but with a bit of editing experience, I did my first "contribution" page, listed the references and found that a box had snuck up and enclosed them without my consent or any markup characters that I can see. Now my page looks ridiculous. The boxes have taken on a life of their own.
A box promises to contain, and things that can't be neatly contained can't be put in boxes. A box suggests "this is the real deal," and if the real deal could be put in a box, then there would be no need for articles. A box says, "Here is your PowerPoint bullet point list, so you can find all the world reduced to a reductive summary; please do not strive to understand complexity, for that is for suckers." A box says, "Wikipedia is just like your primary school text book: full of colors and 'bites' of infotainment." A box says, "I, the box maker, have just pissed all over this article and written a counter-article, and it's short, so read it instead." A box may be found useful by some people, indeed. We call those people "non-readers."
Little boxes, all the same. There's a green one and a pink one And a blue one and a yellow one And they're all made out of ticky-tacky And they all look just the same.
And the people in the houses All go to the university, And they all get put in boxes, Little boxes, all the same.
ABOUT INFOBOXES?
