 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: An article may turn out to benefit from an infobox. Do not reject one out of hand just because it's your article. |
| Rationale | Sometimes even the most erudite of scholars just wants to check a key fact about a topic. A well-crafted infobox gives exactly that opportunity, as well as providing structured data and microformats for third-parties to reuse. |
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A lot of misinformation is written about infoboxes and Wikipedia:Disinfoboxes is a prime example. Although it is true that no infobox is required or prohibited, infoboxes are often expected in articles. Close to 3 million infoboxes are in our 6,961,248 articles, and around 75% of featured articles have an infobox. It's not surprising then, that an editor may ask "Why hasn't this article got an infobox?" We need to ensure that decisions taken on whether to include an infobox – and more importantly what goes in it – are made on the basis of reason, not capricious expressions of "I don't like them", nor the sort of misinformation which is commonly spread.