User:Arg342/School sandbox

School sandbox is my sandbox.

Are there advantages to having separate infoboxes for schools and school districts:

• Appearance:
  • Nearly a draw. Both are fairly nice. ~isd is arguably a little nicer with more headings.
• Maintenance:
  • Single template solution has a slight advantage here.
    • Only one to maintain. ~is is already a monster (I count 260 possible parameters, many of which are currently undocumented and included for backward compatability); it would only need three simple fields added to it to make a redirect from ~isd work 100%.
      • asst_superintendent
      • schools
      • teachers
    • Two templates would mean one monster and one tame domestic pet to maintain. Since there is still a monster, I don’t see the advantage here, UNLESS there is going to be a future effort to untangle ~is, and I don’t know that there is enough energy and commitment in the community to warrant that.
• Usage instructions:
  • This can be a draw with clear instructions to future editors. As it stands now, it is unclear.
• Ease of use:
  • This again can be a draw, especially if ISCL is improved or variants are created.
  • My idea here is to either add parameters to ISCL or create variants so that editors wishing to create a new school related infobox would get a blank template with fewer fields, but aimed more specifically to what they want. For example, if ISCL could take a country code, then 1) they can get the country specific infobox, if there is one (such as Canada or UK) and 2) if getting the generic ~is, fields that specifically do not apply can be suppressed. A great deal more could be done here, including making a wizard of some sort to interview the editor and deliver a concise infobox template.

Solutions:

1. Clean up documentation and improve/supplement ISCL:
   1. ALL of the possible solutions would require this!
2. Direct editors to use ~isd or ~is as appropriate, but allow existing articles to stay as they are:
   1. Add a few fields to ~isd, improve documentation, and we can move forward.
3. Direct editors to use ~isd or ~is as appropriate, and aggressively move the districts currently using ~is to ~isd:
   1. While this could be done, I count about 900 articles using ~is that include "district" or "schools" (plural) in the title. This would be a big job and I am not sure it would be worth the effort.
4. Switch to a one template solution (~is) by doing a redirect from ~isd to ~is:
   1. This would not require a great effort as far as I can tell. It would require the addition of the three fields to ~is and making the redirect and it would be done.
5. Switch to a one template solution (~is) by editing the articles currently pointing to ~isd and changing them to ~is:
   1. Same as #4, but requires editing about 685 articles