Template talk:Infobox website: Difference between revisions

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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Infobox website template.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic. New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help. Assume good faith Be polite and avoid personal attacks Be welcoming to newcomers Seek dispute resolution if needed

Archives: 1, 2, 3Auto-archiving period: 30 days

Currently, the suggested templates for AlexaRanks in the infobox are (given the previous ranking is 100):

• 70
• 100
• 200

But in reality, given the nature that it is a ranking, shouldn't "up" mean decrease in ranking number? Thus I think it should be written as:

• 70
• 100
• 200

C933103 (talk) 01:15, 1 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The number decreases but the change is a 'positive' change. I don't see a problem with the current templates. --Izno (talk) 01:50, 1 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Izno:I mean, despite the number decreases, the rank is moving in an increasing direction. Thus Going from #100 to #70 should be an increase not decrease. C933103 (talk) 02:08, 2 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

No. Increasing means Y2 > Y1. Going from 100 to 70 is Y2 < Y1. That is a decrease. --Izno (talk)

But when I search "increase" "rank" in google (with quotation marks for exact matches), all the results I see are talking about how to get better in different ranking list. C933103 (talk) 18:01, 2 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

That's fine. This isn't Google. --Izno (talk) 18:10, 2 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

......Google is just a reflection of all the different site on the internet and a reflection of mind of people who created content on those sites... C933103 (talk) 14:16, 5 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@C933103: I'm still confused about about the increase and decrease. --Wei4Green | 唯绿远大 (talk) 03:49, 12 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I am also confused by the current arrangement. C933103 (talk) 04:18, 12 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This is a recurring issue - eg this apparent resolution. It's conventional for an upward-pointing arrow to show a rise in rank and a downward arrow to show a fall. This is found outside Wikipedia in, for example, tables of sports leagues accompanied by indications of rises and falls. Similarly, Alexa's own trend charting shows improvements in ranking as rising towards the top of the chart towards #1. We confuse our readers and break with convention if we show the vast majority of improvements with upward arrows but reverse that for Alexa. 92.19.25.230 (talk) 09:26, 13 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

FYI, this discussion is now split between here and Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#"Increase" and "Decrease" in rank. ―Mandruss ☎ 15:28, 14 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

And the discussion on Village pump is now concluded without any clear outcome other than the general sense of action shall be taken ... C933103 (talk)

Bot Job and arrows

Hello watchers and prior discussion contributors. @Lkolbly: plans to run a bot job to update these rankings (see Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/LkolblyBot). The only thing left to consider is this arrow direction issue. The discussion above doesn't look to solid so am pinging everyone for comments. Feel free to comment here or at the BRFA.

• @C933103, Izno, Wei4Green, and Mandruss:. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:05, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Honestly, the field should be removed as being trivial. We do not define the importance or notability of a website on its Alexa ranking, and updating these fields would make trivial bot edits every X days, which is little to no value add. This is especially true of the long tail of websites. --Izno (talk) 16:41, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • For sure there's a long tail of websites for which it's silly (if your Alexa rank is in the millions, nobody cares). But, I think there is at least marginal value, at least as a rough indicator of website popularity/size/reach. For example, US visitors to the Baidu page would be surprised to see that it is ranked fourth, since it is not a website I have ever visited ever. However, that information doesn't come up in the text of the article until the fourth paragraph (except, of course, for a reference to the Alexa rank itself). I just conducted a straw poll of everyone I know. All three of them said that an "increase in rank" indicates a lower-valued rank for the reason that you're "moving up in the world". Lkolbly (talk) 20:53, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • Ignoring the arrows bit, even external to the long tail, say, outside the top 100 or 500, nobody cares in the general case. Websites which are highly-ranked by a particular service (since Alexa is not the only service and really never has been) should be covered in some other article (list?) and their rankings adjusted centrally in that one document, with verbiage in the document. As voiced at VPT by another, it's really silly to replicate a single external company's idea of which websites are more or less popular (there is a WP:POV issue in there). --Izno (talk) 21:21, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      • Agreed that it is a little odd to maintain duplicated information from some random 3rd party company (hence the bot request, so humans don't have to care). However, it is useful information, and useful information to keep in the infobox (even if only for the top few thousand). The exact number isn't useful, but it's useful in that it provides a general sense of website popularity, information which is not otherwise present in the infobox. The exact choice of Alexa is arbitrary, for 90% of sites I'm sure most information providers agree.Lkolbly (talk) 21:31, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I waded into this on my own at [1] and was pointed here. I would much more want to see actual readership numbers than ranks among some set of sites Alexa ranks. I think multiple sources giving a range of these actual numbers (since they can be compared to each other) would be more likely to be unbiased. And if there is to be some graphic alongside website statistics to be created by a bot, then the graphic should be a rendition of the timeline of readership for something like five calendar years, to at least start to kick back against recentism. Wnt (talk) 02:54, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

At first I was going to say that total readership is usually something websites keep secret, but, SimilarWeb appears to offer a visit counter, so maybe that's not an unreasonable thing to do. I don't know whether they'd be willing to have us mirror that data here, I'd have to ask. Lkolbly (talk) 13:01, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

As someone else noted, it's like tracking stock prices. We don't do it because Wikipedia is not designed for time series data. We are a long-term source of data. But even if we were to keep it updated say yearly, the right way is store the data in a database (CSV file on Commons, or Wikidata) and display via a Lua template, so we don't edit the page with a bot every time it changes which is the worse way. -- GreenC 14:42, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This looks like this discussion has expanded to WP:VPPOL#Alexa rank question. @Lkolbly: As you are the only editor not to have commented there, you may wish to involve yourself. I would recommend others contribute to that discussion instead. --Izno (talk) 15:22, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

We need additional fields to handle websites that have closed, such as MyDaughter. A notable website continues to be notable after it has closed down, see WP:NOTTEMPORARY. I think we need new fields for the closure date and an archived copy of the homepage when it was active, as follows:

• date-closed
• archiveurl
• archivedate

Verbcatcher (talk) 22:47, 4 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Dead links are currently handled a number of ways via archive bots (see WP:Link rot). Adding custom mechanisms for each of the many thousands of templates and infoboxes may not be a good idea there is no guarantee the bots will be programmed to handle it. One can mark the link with {{dead link}} and run IABot on the page (History tab->Fix dead links). -- GreenC 14:27, 6 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

How often should the Alexa rank be updated on any given website's infobox? I'm asking because one user keeps frequently updating the ranking on Gab (social network), and changing the "increase/decrease" symbols accordingly, which seems unnecessary at best, misleading and/or irritating at worst. Softlavender (talk) 05:34, 6 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This is becoming a topic of discussion in various places. How to technically include this information, what to include, how often to update etc.. IMO this information should be updated maybe once or twice a year and it should be done via a Lua template so we are not constantly manually changing articles and the stats are consistently-relative across articles. It will require an RFC at some point to solidify and a lot of programming efforts. -- GreenC 14:21, 6 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Please see #Bot Job and arrows and associated VPPOL link. --Izno (talk) 15:30, 6 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Some websites undergo name changes but there is currently no field to indicate this in the infobox, which seems like a large oversight to me. I propose adding a parameter for "former_name" à la Template:Infobox company. Sock (tock talk) 00:45, 25 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

please discuss/clarify: if a website allows read-only access without registration and additionally allows posting for registered users, is that registration=Optional or Required?--Elastano (talk) 13:48, 26 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I see that Industry is included in the preview, but not in the template code itself. Is this a mistake in the template code? JC713 (talk) 18:30, 6 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]