Infoboxes

An infobox is a standardized data panel placed at the top of many encyclopedia-style articles to summarize the subject’s most important facts. It is designed to provide a concise at-a-glance reference and to facilitate data reuse by machines and human readers. The exact layout varies by site and skin, but infoboxes are usually displayed in the upper-right area of the page.

Infoboxes are built from templates that define a set of fields (parameters). The fields are tailored to the subject type. For a person, common fields include birth date, nationality, occupation, and notable works; for a location, fields include coordinates, population, area, and administrative region; for organizations, fields include founded date, headquarters, and industry. The template ensures consistency across articles and enables automated updates.

Many platforms link infobox data to centralized knowledge graphs and databases, such as Wikidata, enabling cross-article linking and programmatic data retrieval. This makes infobox data reusable in external apps, searches, and structured data projects.

Benefits include improved navigation, quicker access to essential facts, and easier data extraction. Limitations and risks include vandalism, outdated information, inconsistencies among articles, and the need for ongoing maintenance to reflect changes in the subject.

In practice, infoboxes are a core feature of many wiki projects, with community-maintained templates and conventions guiding which fields should appear for each subject type. They balance human readability with machine readability to support both readers and data-driven workflows.