Forum:Bio infobox placement

Today, an unregistered user made a good-faith helpful edit to Bonehilda. Among the changes made in this user's edit, was moving Simbio3 from its original location, directly below Simbio1, to the beginning of the article section about Bonehilda in The Sims 3. I later manually reverted the relocation, because other articles which utilize the Simbio templates tend to keep the bio templates grouped together in a line, one after the other. At the same time, I cannot find any particular guideline in the Manual of Style or elsewhere which suggests that this is the proper course of action; in fact, as far as I can tell, there is no guideline whatsoever regarding where Simbio templates should be placed within the article.

From an aesthetic standpoint, moving the simbio to the beginning of the relevant section, instead of keeping it at the start of the article, makes more sense. Moving it means that the biographical information included in the article text is aligned with the information in the bio infobox. At the same time, however, I realize that on most Sim pages, the height of each bio infobox tends to be greater than the height of the corresponding section of text. So in effect, if we were to move the infoboxes to line up with the section headers, there would be numerous blank spaces within the articles.

All that being said, I wonder if it might be worth considering grouping the simbio infoboxes with the relevant sections, if doing so would not create large gaps in the article text. On pages like Bonehilda, this would have the effect of breaking up the infoboxes, and keeping the boxes close to their relevant section. This would benefit those articles from a visual perspective, but it could add another degree of complexity as well, since we'd have to determine on an article-by-article basis whether to separate the infoboxes by section or keep them all together.

Ultimately, I'm undecided. So, I am curious what everyone else thinks.

-  LostInRiverview talk • blog  •  contribs 02:00, November 7, 2014 (UTC)

Discussion
I'd probably go with grouping the simbio box with the relevant information where possible, provided doing so wouldnt create unnecessary white-space such as in the Bonehilda article. Moving the infoboxes in such a way to line up with section headers would create whitespace that is too big to be desirable which would probably be even worse for users using monobook so that's definitely something I'd like to avoid. I don't know how one would word this in the MoS, maybe something like "Infoboxes are to be placed in an order of game release and in a linear format, however if doing so would not cause excess whitespace, the infobox should be placed with the relevant content." At the very least I think that a standard format other than the one we have now is virtually impossible so it would be somewhat hard to enforce these standards.

Something else occurred to me. I think it might be worth noting that on other articles that use infoboxes (object articles come to mind as one example), we group the infobox with the relevant section. It seems to be only on Sim articles where we keep the infoboxes clustered together. But, you could also argue that many of our object articles have excessive amounts of empty space in the middle if the article, due to the practice of lining up the infoboxes by section. --  LostInRiverview talk • blog  •  contribs 02:21, November 7, 2014 (UTC)

I am just as torn about it as well. I saw that edit and wasn't sure if I should do something with it or not as well. On the one hand it is nice to have the infobox next to the info in the article, but on the other hand not having so much white space is nice too. Having a case by case "rule" wouldn't really be that practical because there will be times when it become borderline, and what do we do then. It would also make it confusing from a readers viewpoint because it isn't very consistent. I know that this has all been stated already, but I just wanted to say that I am just as curious what is suggested as well. -- Icemandeaf (talk) 05:02, November 7, 2014 (UTC)

I prefer the layout we have now. Ѧüя◎ґ (talk) 00:01, December 8, 2014 (UTC)

Closing
There is not a consensus here to establish a change in practice. Therefore it would be best to continue placing the infoboxes in the same manner as we do now. This practice has not been an established policy, but has become a de facto standard. --  LostInRiverview talk • blog  •  contribs 05:08, January 11, 2015 (UTC)