WWW/Internet - Portal do Software Público Brasileiro

ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISby the community in an essay format. Although many kinds of structure have evolved on Wikipedia since itbegan, this articles focuses on only 2: section headings and infoboxes.Section headings are the titles given to the divisions in an article, and are usually listed in the table ofcontents, if one is present. They are editor chosen and dependent on the article contents, so not all possiblesection headings are in every article. This inclusion of structure has provoked no major reactions from editorsbut seems to have been a natural addition to any article long enough to have more than one distinct part.Starting in 2002, some science oriented Wikipedia articles began presenting some information in visuallyseparate “infoboxes” (Figure 1), which divide information into a label and its corresponding value, allowingusers to quickly identify relationships or compare properties through the infobox rather than searching forthat information in the main article. Infoboxes then began appearing in other articles as ways to quicklyreference typical information or as a summary for the basic information for very large articles. Morerecently, Wikipedia has seen a backlash against infoboxes, with some editors complaining that they areunnecessary, unattractive, redundant, and that they inappropriately oversimplify some subjects. In response,Wikipedia published a manual of style for infoboxes and various essays condemning the “infobox virus”(Projectpage: boxes., 2010) and calling for the removal of infoboxes failing to meet requirements for addedvalue, length relative to the main article, or subjective information content (Projectpage: disinfoboxes., 2010)in order to return to a “glorious preindustrial (pre-box) editor's paradise” (Projectpage: boxes., 2010)The antipathy toward infoboxes seems to come from the rapid numerical increase (Figure 2) and a failureto recognize benefits that outweigh their “negative” appearance and psychological effects (Discussion page:Disinfoboxes., 2010). Some editors see a value from aiding translation between different languageWikipedias (Project page: thinking outside the infobox., 2010), allowing quick and easy access to sometypes of information, and encouraging a uniform style (Discussion page: boxes., 2010), but these editors alsoadvocate major improvements or restrictions to limit the negatives. One benefit not mentioned in thediscussions of infobox pros and cons machine search-ability which allows websites like dbpedia to takesearch over the structured, compositional, regular and standard format infoboxes of many articles, combiningcriteria and compiling lists of all items that share many properties.Both section headings and infoboxes represent the addition of structure to Wikipedia articles, but thebenefits of these features come not from adding or improving information, as the infobox critics demand theyshould, but from organizing information and adding structure. This structure permits an exploitation of therelationship between organized information across many articles, providing a benefit for the entire structuredsystem, not individual articles.(a)(b)Figure 1. Wikipedia article with and without structureAn early version (a) of the Wikipedia article for comedian Eddie Izzard without structure and a laterversion (b) with structures such as an infobox (on right, including a picture) and a table of contents (on left)with some section headings.340