Category-specific infobox designs
We could improve on visual distinction between articles on subjects from different categories (such as blocks, items, entities, biomes, structures and so on) by tweaking infoboxes to have either different colors (like on Wikipedia), a symbolic icon representing the category, or something else.
Ever since 2013 (I believe) the Russian wiki uses different colors for some of the infobox templates (see also here). However, the system isn’t comprehensive (blocks and items still have the default color for example), isn’t compatible with dark mode (though it’s potentially fixable), and the color choice is rather questionable, best exemplified by the Entity infobox having a reddish color that better suits Dungeons, and the cyan Food one being well in Legends territory — preventing RuMCW from switching to the new infobox design which has different colors for spin-offs. Still, some RuMCW users maintain that some sort of color distinction for different categories is needed.
Therefore, I suggest an alternative approach, which is to add a decently-sized symbolic icon to the infobox header. A cube for blocks, a gemstone or paper sheet for items, a silhouette for mobs, stuff like that. This way, we don’t need to bother with colors — it would only need to match the text’s color (which is white for both light and dark modes). The trickiest part might be implementing the same shadow effect the header text has.
— BabylonAS 08:21, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
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Support using icons. Oakar567 (talk) 08:33, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
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Strong support for icons. But I still think (as by linked discussion above) it should be possible to use different colours as well. It just needs to take the different game editions into account with their own theme-specific colours. If a compromise could be formed to keep each edition distinctly coloured from the others, while each category-specific content can have their own compatible colour separately, I would support that too. The other interwikis such as the Russian one could (switch to) use the same resulting colour scheme to fix the current problems it has with this. Because it would be so nice to have distinctly coloured content categories, to be able to first-glance differentiate content by colour. The human eye is very good at differentiating colours (besides colourblind people), it is much better at it than at differentiating icons (although icons are still important too). - Jack McKalling (talk) 09:42, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
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Strong Support - As I have said multiple times before, images makes a page look more colourful than the normal plain text when there are no images and thus, I support the addition of icons. - 👁 Image
StizzurpXDD(talk) 09:48, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
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Oppose for now, sorry. It's hard to decide whether I'd like this, because it's a purely visual proposal, yet there is no visual example for me to look at. Otherwise, an icon isn't really aesthetically interesting nor is it as easily glanceable as the infobox's colour being different, so I'm not confident they'd even accomplish their job effectively. I fear slapping an icon onto all infobox headers would make them messy, not all of these icons are going to blend with the solid green background. I also worry they'd be confusing to some people, is everyone going to understand right away that this little icon is meant to be just telling you what category the page is in? What icons are going to work best as generic representations of a category? You can't use like the most iconic item for example, just putting a diamond there doesn't really work I'd say. And I don't think custom icons would work either, well, if we just implemented it and then waited then people will come to understand what they mean, but I don't know if that's a good way to go about it.
- As an alternative, I'll suggest the most boring method we could go about this, but I think it'd still be best. I think we should literally just put a piece of fainter and smaller text below the infobox's title that says what the category is. On the creeper page, there's small text that says "Mob", on the village page, "Structure". This is super boring, but ironically I think it'd look best, because while these icon and colour suggestions are flashier, I think because of that they'll make infoboxes messier. Small text is boring but it looks neat and fits in nicely. - Harristic / Talk 👁 Image
22:16, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
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Support small text to clearly indicate the categories, at least before changing colors or adding icons. Thinking about it again, specifically naming the categories might make them stand out more, and make it look inconsistent if a page doesn't fit in one of them, although I'm not sure how many such pages have infoboxes. This would also apply to icons though you could have some default icon. –Sonicwave talk 05:18, 17 May 2024 (UTC)- I'm not really sure that small text would have as much visual impact as icons. — BabylonAS 16:17, 25 May 2024 (UTC)
- I'm not really of the opinion that infoboxes need anything more visually, they look very nice to me already. I'm not opposed to making them more visually interesting though, and I think my opposition will become softer (or I'd be neutral on the topic) once I've seen your mock up icons for mobs and structures and such, the block mock up does look nice in concept. I just think other aspects of pages could use more visual flair, such as navboxes (don't worry I'll be cautious not to change the conversation's topic). - Harristic / Talk 👁 Image
17:42, 25 May 2024 (UTC)
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Oppose - I think it's great to add more visual imagery to the wiki, but I don't really see what benefit this would have. Infoboxes are already fairly small, so there's not really a good spot to put an icon. Plus, I've never felt a need for this. I've never been reading an article and been inconvenienced by an icon not being on an infobox, it just seems like it's trying to make things look a little fancier. Which is fine, but in this case, I think its visual clutter. - BD (talk) 17:47, 25 May 2024 (UTC)
