"Peter Ansell" &lt;ansell.peter(a)gmail.com&gt; writes <snip> Well they often are, and they can't. Or rather, they aren't very good with anything that isn't simple, and in lots of areas things are rarely simple. Give people an infobox with fields to be filled in and, no surprises here, they'll be filled in sooner or later. The basic biographical infobox, {{Infobox Person}}, has fields for place and date of birth and death, and so do the endless variants. These are a perpetual temptation for the well-intentioned wikignome to spend ten seconds googling and fill in something. Metadata, such as {{Persondata}}, has the same problem. Readers may like infoboxes - perhaps a sample size of one-ish is a bit small to be sure - but the info they contain may not always be a fair representation of what the article actually says. Infoboxes are poor at complicated subjects like "where and when was Charlemagne born?", "when did Saint Patrick die?", but they get used for it all the same. Even something like "when was William Shakespeare born?" gets mangled when the nice, neat, square peg of knowing his baptismal date is battered into the round hole of adding his birth date to a template. Infoboxes are designed with the assumption that there's a True answer. But often there's no simple answer to questions like "born when?" and "died when?". When combined with the seemingly endless stream of editors who'd sooner add a date than read what the article says, this can get tedious, although nobody's yet added St Pat's birth date in 2008. Even wikimarkup has the same problem of failing to handle imprecise dates correctly based on user preferences unless they are spelled out in full: "... born between [[23 April]] [[1141]] and [[24 May]] [[1141]]....". But who considers the data that fields might hold when designing templates? And why would dates ever be imprecise? You know, I don't think I like infoboxes very much. Angus