Template talk:Infobox football biography/Archive 1

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Discussion

Hi, I hope this will be useful. Dont hesitate to improve this template. Have a look at David Beckham, Vincent Kompany or Mbo Mpenza for examples. Julien Tuerlinckx 12:45, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

I think it is good idea. thanks. --Monkbel 17:09, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

It is time to add info in the box since only few players already have the infobox in their articles. I suggest to add the following:

• Position
• Right/Left footed
• Distinctions like Golden Boot
• Place of birth
• Nationalities?

What else? Julien Tuerlinckx 12:34, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

Something else: Should we count the current season games played by a player in the Professional clubs part since it would be generally updated weekly which is quite boring isn't it? Another annoying thing is: what stats should be displayed in the infobox? For the number of matches played, should it be the number of league matches (as it is currently) or the number of official matches with the club (i.e. taking into account domestic and european cup matches), or both? How could we organize this. I also ask the question because i havent got much knowledge in template editing and on its capabilities. Thanx, Julien Tuerlinckx 15:20, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

Player Name

Guys, with the notable exception of Brazilians and Spaniards, most of the players use their last name in their shirt. "playername" should be the player's name for everybody except for those who wear a different name on their shirts.

--Sebastian Kessel ^Talk 16:19, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Honours won

I think a section for anything a player has won (both club and individual honours) would be good. CTOAGN 16:58, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

True, but it might make it a tad long. Maybe just individual honours? --Sebastian Kessel ^Talk 17:04, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Possibly, but I think that if a player's won a league championship or similar it should be mentioned. Same with major internatoinal honours. CTOAGN 18:23, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Maybe in the article? I really see very long infoboxes if we go that way. --Sebastian Kessel ^Talk 18:30, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

I concur with Sebastian, (individual and team) honours should be written in a separate section in the article itself. I think it should become a standard in football player articles by the way.

Revert and update

Julien, sorry to revert your changes, but please b4 doing something that critical put it here.

I don't think it is necessary to add that much information to the infobox. We have retired players that don't play in any "cups" or "teams" right now and the box looks positively ugly without that information. Besides, with close to 50 pages using the box, going back and fixing them all is a long task.

Let's discuss here.

--Sebastian Kessel ^Talk 15:04, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Okay, I was browsing through players article and when I remembered the article about Thierry Henry used a table with the detailed selections and goals (the repartition between cup, champ and contiental matches). I think this is the way it should be done, with the infobox summarizing the caps(goals) as it is since the beginning, as sebastian said.

Another thing i was worried about is, as you say, that we would have to change every week the caps(goals) for every player. That's why I added a update field in the box. i think we should keep this as it permits us to update the ciphers when we want to while the ciphers will remain correct. I let you add the update field (needed for both national and team caps(goals))...

Julien Tuerlinckx 15:27, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Note also that the Thierry Henry article separates each season which is to me a good thing (since it would have been too long to go in the infobox). Julien Tuerlinckx 15:28, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Julien, Please do the update field, since I am not exactly sure on how to do it. :)

--Sebastian Kessel ^Talk 15:30, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Actually it's not that easy. I think it will be quite annoying to have an update field for retired players. So I think this leaves 2 possibilities:

• either we create a new infobox (retired football player infobox) slightly different from the current player infobox (like we should do the manager infobox);
• or we add the date of retiring of the player so that any update date posterior to the retiring date would be correct.

Julien Tuerlinckx 16:44, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

I would leave it as it is, and add the update. I know of quite a few players who "unretired", meaning the "As of XXX" may actually be good. :)

--Sebastian Kessel ^Talk 16:50, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Ok I added the update as footnotes. I think it looks quite good. Now we need to add the fields pcupdate (last time we updated the pro club caps and goals) and ntupdate (same for national team) to each infobox. Cheers, Julien Tuerlinckx 14:15, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

Manager infobox

When i began this infobox, my goal was also to use it to create a manager infobox. I think we just need to add a section (within the infobox) with a title like managed clubs or something. if someone has the time to do it... Julien Tuerlinckx 15:32, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Julien, the only problem I have is that I don't know how to disable something that I don't want on the infobox. Most players we have didn't manage a club. Either they are currently playing, or they just didn't do it. I don't think we should add a section for maybe 20%-30% of the players, unless it can be safely and discreetly hidden when not in use. --Sebastian Kessel ^Talk 16:26, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

I just thought about copypasting the content of this infobox into a new page called Template:Football manager infobox and adding the new section. If some managers have a player infobox, it suffices to change player by manager in the box and add the new fields.

Julien Tuerlinckx 16:40, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

I like that, but let me perfect the idea. We have two infoboxes:

1. Regular Player
2. Player then Manager (The manager was still a player, let us not forget)

The only difference is that the 2nd infobox will have the manager section

--Sebastian Kessel ^Talk 16:48, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

The Template:Football manager infobox is now achieved. Just add the following characters to player infoboxes of managers (if you follow me):

| manageryears = | managerclubs = , and fill it if you want to. You can see an example at Franky Vercauteren or Georges Leekens. Julien Tuerlinckx 17:55, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

ref/note

I've commented out the ref/note templates as they break the nunbering on pages that already use ref and note. CTOAGN 19:11, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Okay, but I think we will need the notes however, but not neccessarily in the form of ref/note (even if it's only used by Vincent Kompany at the time). That's all I found when I decided to add the update dates. Any suggestion about how to keep the info in the box? Thanx, Julien Tuerlinckx 19:47, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

• It should be possible to just put the text in in the format that ref/note uses. You can use the <sup> tag to get superscript text ^{like this} and use the div tag to change text size, eg <div style="font-size: 85%"> smaller text </div> gives:
  smaller text
  Maybe you could use ^* and ^** to link the refs to the footnotes in the infobox - that way there'd be no confusion with any numbered footnote system that the article was using. CTOAGN 20:30, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

I removed the comment and made it the way you suggested. I think it looks quite good. Thanx for the tip, Julien Tuerlinckx 20:48, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

I wondered if it was possible to condition the appearance of the second update parameter (the one for the national teams) because a player who never played for a national team does not need to have an update for his non-existant national team caps and goals... Thanx, Julien Tuerlinckx 10:33, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Something like Template_talk:Qif combined with Wikipedia:Conditional_expressions you mean? Veila 10:01, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Overkill?

Hi. Maybe there's too much information on this infobox? I don't know if it has to/should be this...complex. For instance, keeping an account of how many goals a player scored for each club and (when applicable) the national team. This requires constant updating (except for retired players), and the information is sometimes not-that-easy to come by. As a result, there are infoboxes out there filled with question marks, or with entire sections simply left blank. It might also be why the infobox was not inserted in the biographic articles of some rather conspicuous players (e.g. Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Samuel Eto'o, Frank Lampard — this last one using a different infobox). Maybe there's no need for this much information on the infobox? Regards, Redux 05:56, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Hi! As I did create this infobox, I will stand for it... If you compare Lampard's infobox and this one you will find that this of Lampard is way more "complete" than this one and there are the goals scored in the national team. For the problem of the club caps and goals, i added two fields (ntupdate and pcupdate) so that the numbers should not be updated each time a player plays for the infobox to be correct. maybe it was too ambitious to think we could retrieve the info for every player but I think we can give it a try. For example, in Belgium, at the beginning of each season, you have a list of all first division players with the caps and goals in the previous clubs and i think this is the same in the big (football) countries. That's my piece of advice,

NB: Have a look at chelseafc.com: they have thoses stats (those to retrieve are the league stats) for every ex-player.

Julien Tuerlinckx 12:41, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

When I said "too much information", I meant in the sense of realistically hoping to have the board duly filled in every entry. Ideally speaking, it's great. I've also seen that, in some of the cases where people did add the info about the caps and goals, they [presumably] forgot to fill the ntupdate and pcupdate lines, so that key information is missing. Also, for some African, Asian and American players, it could be really difficult to find information such as their youth clubs. Furthermore, in South American countries, the information of the career caps and goals, and especially if broken down by club, is not so readly available. Redux 02:21, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Ok, I think we need a third piece of advice... Maybe the best thing would be to be able to work with or without this info. E.g. if we don't have the info, the infobox should be left blank at those places (no '?'). Furthermore it could be great if the youth club and national team sections could be invisible if the info is not available or if the player never played for a national team. Can we do this? Julien Tuerlinckx 19:02, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Talking about overkill, the "place of birth" is somewhat irrelevant as I see it - fore example Brian Laudrup was born in Vienna (Austria) as his father was playing professionally there at the time but that doesn't tell you anything about him as a football player. I mean - the thing of interest is which country a player represents internationally, not the exact place of birth which is already taken care of in the main article. I know there are other facts covered in the article, like time of birth, but info on the persons age (for quickly determining "old" or young up-coming players) is more relevant than where he is born, as I see it. Poulsen 11:56, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

When I created the infobox used in the Frank Lampard article I did not know about Template:Football player infobox. I've been thinking for a long time whether the latter should be used rather, because I think there should be a consistency in how the articles look and the information they have. As Poulsen says, if "place of birth" is mentioned in the main article, maybe it isn't necessary to have it in the infobox (the same goes for "nickname"). In their place maybe we could have entries on "honours", etc.

As regards the "matches played" and "goals scored", I think it is far more easier to find details for international matches than club ones. Maybe we could just have details for internationals in the infobox, and the club details, if available, could have a separate table (as in the Lampard article). -Aabha (talk) 04:14, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

I feel that Nickname(s) and Position(s) have value as they're a useful part of the synopsis that the box provides. However, a full list of nicknames is, perhaps, a little too verbose for the box and would be more useful in the main article. Likewise, if a player is versatile enough to play in multiple positions then that would deserve a more detailed analysis in the main text. To that end, I think that Nickname(s) and Position(s) should be changed to Nickname and Position and the author should use their discretion to pick the most appropriate single entry. Veila 09:09, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Template name and categorisation

Based on the prevailing standard at Wikipedia:Infobox_templates#People it would seem that the correct name for this template would be Infobox football player. Is it likely to prove overly ardous to make that change? It would also be useful to include the infobox at Wikipedia:Infobox as well. Veila 08:10, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Aesthetics

Most biographical infoboxes that I've looked at seem to set font-size at 95% and limit the box width to around 25em. These two changes make the box look a little less "chunky" which I find more pleasing. What do others think? Also, the datestamp is quite heavy and detracts attention somewhat from the information. Perhaps font-weight: lighter; font-size: 80%; would be appropriate given that it's a qualification of information, rather than information itself? Finally, consider the work that Rascalb has done on an American Football infobox at his user page; specifically the choice of #b0c4de as the background colour. I think it provides a rather attractive contrast and avoids the washed out look of black on grey on white. Veila 09:02, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, I've finally finished my Duncan Ferguson rewrite and one of the things I did was put together my ideas on the player infobox. I'd appreciate any comments people might have. Veila 08:06, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

This looks great to me. I would however change the title of playing details to something that would contain the word 'club'. We could also expand the national team section by adding a field youth teams (where we would write U-21 or U-17 for example) and one with the number too. And it should be feasible to hide fields with no info (we alreday spoke about this somewhere). Julien Tuerlinckx 12:16, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

This looks really good. -Aabha (talk) 04:38, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, I think I've done the heavy lifting I was aiming for. I've tried to ensure that these modifications don't break existing uses. It appears that almost everything is working well, the only problem I've found was on the Alan Shearer infobox where the position entry was a small essay which led to a huge infobox! I've also included a pretty comprehensive usage guide so we can get the best out of this template. Included in there is a style guide section that reflects only my opinion; I'd really appreciate it if others could debate these points so it can be a community driven consensus. I decided to include the style guide unilateraly to stimulate debate, not to impose my personal preferences. I think I'm going to go lie down now... ;) Veila 10:22, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Place of birth

I think place of birth should either be hidden (if no entries are made) or completely removed. The data is already in the main article and, unlike other data duplicate from main article to infobox, the place of birth is in no way significant. A player could be born on another continent, if his parents happened to live there at the time, without that meaning anything for him as a "football player" - which is what the infobox should cover. An example would be Brian Laudrup whose father played in Austria, and so he was born there, but the main point of interest isn't where he was born, but what country he would play for internationally. Also, there's the case of all those players who don't explicitly state where they are from, with their "?, Country" entries looking pretty sloppy.

In all, I think the place of birth header should be replaced by a "nationality" header, as nationality is much more important for a football player than where he happened to be born. Poulsen 10:36, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree actually. Anything we can do to trim out useless data would be beneficial since a fully populated box is rather large. Since I've made so many unilateral changes recently though, I think I'll let a few others voice their opinions on this one! Veila 10:41, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm a bit unsure if having details of appearances and goals in the infobox in an article where there is a separate table for stats (Thierry Henry, for eg) is needed. They might even have conflicting numbers, if not updated at the same time. -Aabha (talk) 13:05, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

I think it's OK as long as the update time is written in both tables. The advantage of havigng both tables is to have a quick overview of the player's career in the box, that you can compare with other players, and to have a detailed view (with assists, Continental games, etc.) in the article (only for well-known players?). Julien Tuerlinckx 14:05, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

I've just run through all 297 (!) articles that make use of this infobox and cleaned up any problems that my recent additions have made. One thing I noticed was that a very large majority of the boxes failed to make use of the {{{pcupdate}}} and {{{ntupdate}}} parameters. I think the current solution works well, but if editors aren't using it then it might be necessary to rethink matters. Veila 05:33, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree that (footballing) nationality should rate a mention; how about incorporating a nice little flag to brighten the boxes up a bit? -- Jellyman 07:25, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

I think this is hinted at by Poulsen above, but would it be possible to do away with the default comma that's included in the place of birth and death fields? If a player's city of birth is unknown, but the country is listed, it looks unsightly (see Miguel Simão). I'd prefer it if editors had to add the comma manually. - Dudesleeper · Talk 22:10, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Is it the case that you would use {{{cityofbirth}}} without {{{countryofbirth}}}? If not (i.e. if city of birth is present, then country of birth always is), {{{cityofbirth}}} can be moved inside an #if: function which would only display the field and the comma if used. Namely, something like this:

{{#if:{{{cityofbirth| }}}|({{{cityofbirth}}}),}}

Usage would remain the same. Severo 22:26, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Comma after cityofbirth

Could this be made to not show, if the cityofbirth is blank? It looks a bit on of players whose place of birth is unknown (e.g. Emiliano Insua), which is fairly common. It also applies to cityofdeath. ArtVandelay13 14:31, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

See Template talk:Infobox football biography#Place of birth. Replacing

{{{cityofbirth}}},

with

{{#if:{{{cityofbirth| }}}|({{{cityofbirth}}}),}}

would do it. A similar edit could me made to {{{city of death}}}. Severo^TC 15:00, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

I've added added the fix for both the birth and death parameters. Hope it works okay. – Elisson • T • C • 16:11, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

This template needs a width: attribute. Any suggestions?

So that it does look uniform on pages and isn't dictated by the text in the table. x42bn6 Talk 08:21, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

It's okay as it is. Sometimes there are huge club names, and imposing a fixed width would mean that hundreds of articles would require new breaks (<br>). Pages look uniform enough; it's not as if they're ever seen side by side, so differences in width are a necessary but unproblematic evil.
Slumgum 10:30, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

I tried putting in a (generous) fixed width of 25em a few days ago but it broke too many boxes. The only way this could be done is by slimming every box before the fixed width was imposed, but that's a huge amount of work for neglible gain. The most extreme example I can think of is on the Michael Ballack article where the infobox contains a youth club named BSG Motor Fritz Heckert Karl-Marx-Stadt. ⁂veila# 11:17, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

rv of changes by Ed_g2s

There are several issues regarding the template modifications made by User:Ed_g2s that have not been explained in adequete detail so I have elected to revert them, awaiting his appearance on this talk page.

1. neutral colour – The subjective design decision to revert back to the original grey is opposed to the prevailing opinion as visible on this very talk page. In addition, Wikipedia:Infobox_colours is certainly not devoid of colour which would beg the question of why #b0c4de; is objectionable.
2. remove crest as fair use... – This assumes that all crests fall under identical licenses that prohibit such use.
3. fix hiddenStructure technique – According to my reading of Wikipedia:HiddenStructure, the original incarnation was correct. The example given therein is that of Template:Infobox President which also makes use of the incumbent method. It may well be that the documentation is wrong, but if so, it is a more pressing concern to fix the documentation itself.
4. Undocumented alteration of margin-left – The extra padding to the left of the infobox was highly deliberate and considered. Given the above–average size of the football player infobox, extra whitespace is required to clean the division of text to border. This isn't in the standard infobox class for good reason; it's not required for smaller boxes. The class definition is a starting point, not a rigid conformity. Upon re–reading the CSS file, I realise that margin-left was already set to 1em, I have updated the infobox with this portion of the edit. ⁂veila# 09:32, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

For these reasons I find the edit technically incorrect. Beyond that, it is important to consider the relationship between implementation and documentation when altering the template behaviour. If the case is made to reintroduce these changes then it would be only reasonable to update the documentation also. ⁂veila# 09:09, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

1. Yes there was a small amount of discussion on this talk page about the change of colour, but for a subject such as football, where colour has strong connections with club association, it would be better to leave it as neutral as possible.
2. Are there any club crests which are released under a different license?
3. I assumed getting the code to generate an invalid attribute, then having the parser remove it was a bit ugly, but I couldn't find the documentation you've pointed to. I've seen both techniques used.

ed g2s • talk 15:17, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

1. Well, small or otherwise, there wasn't a dissenting voice. I'm all for reaching consensus on the issue, regardless of what that consensus is, but the current preference appears to be for #b0c4de; so I'd suggest that we leave it, pending more input from others. Anyway, even grey has its advocates; the Everton F.C. away strip comes to mind. The only way to prevent colour bias is to turn the colour into a parameter and set it to the club's identity per instance. That would be a nightmare of inconsistency though.
2. I have no idea... I think it's a nice addition to the box, but it's probably not usable in over 90% of instances. The question becomes: Is it worth policing license abuse of 90% for the benefit of (the more obscure) 10%? I'd assume not, but then I'm only guessing at the 90/10 partition.
3. I understand, the same thought crossed my mind on first implementation and neither seems obviously correct, there's apparently some wikivoodoo being performed along the way. If your method is "more correct" (for some value of more), I'd be really eager to use it, but unless you have some knowledge that the documentation is flawed then I think it's best left alone in case some future change assumes that everybody has followed the documented method.

Please don't think that I'm inherently opposed to your edit (though I am very fond of that light–blue!), I just found it irksome that you made such sweeping changes without discussion and, more importantly, skewed the implementation and documentation in the process. ⁂veila# 08:14, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

I would say it's closer to 99% and 1% for the images (if that), and therefore not worth implementing. I too am fond of light blue, but clearly (in the context of football, at least) grey is far more neutral, and was the colour first chosen. ed g2s • talk 15:42, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Domestic league appearances only

Why is this rule imposed for the infobox? There is no rationale given - to me it seems rather unfair that a player's domestic cup or UEFA Cup/Champions League appearances are excluded from the infobox (especially as they are usually included in the main articles). Qwghlm 19:26, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

While I agree with your sentiment, I also think of the number of edits required to change this and shudder... ⁂veila# 12:39, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Really? Most players' boxes are updated all the time with appearances info anyway, it wouldn't that much of a problem. Qwghlm 11:27, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

I think you're mistaken about the frequency of updates. When I ran through the infoboxes after my updates I found an alarming number of them to be very much neglected. The other problem is that an editor who doesn't track changes in the template might very easily assume that the fields still refer to league appearances only and put in the wrong value. The only realistic approach would be to deprecate the current fields relating to league statistics and add new, more comprehensive fields which would need to then be populated for each box. But hey, I agree with the idea so if you're willing to put in the work... ;) ⁂veila# 10:22, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm just sounding out an idea, but we could change the template and then go through the players' articles and add a 'league apps only' disclaimer to those which include stats (not all do). We could share the workload for that - it would only take about 10 seconds to manually add the disclaimer to each. There's about 500 articles that use the template; probably 350 are fully statted. Over time, the articles' "caretakers" would change the stats to reflect all comps and remove the disclaimer. Maybe the disclaimer could be a template itself?
Slumgum | yap | stalk | 19:45, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

I agree with this idea, as most websites with player stats list all appearances for clubs, not just league appearances. This would take a long time to implement in all infoboxes, though. - Nick C (Review Me!) 19:48, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

I just contacted the site admin of Football Database and he says that the data there if for league appearances. So thats why it think the infobox restricts the data to only league appearances, as these are more freely avaliable.- Nick C 17:47, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi, if its not possible/desireable to change this template, would there be an objection to creating a new template which would include information on all appearances foreign and domestic (i.e. not have the footnote, or change to state that it lists all leagues and competitions) ? I'm more interested in accurately listing the clubs that a player has played for and goals scored than listing just domestic league teams. --Albert.white 21:58, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

I suggest you include a club career table in those cases instead. Various examples of such can be found on some of the good articles and featured articles of the football project. – Elisson • T • C • 22:27, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

The information is freely available for British players. A player may be deprived of close to half his appearances with League Cup, FA Cup and Champions League outings removed. Londo06 12:04, 13 July 2007 (UTC)