Infobox

An infobox may be used to summarize the information of an article on Wikipedia.[3] They are used on similar articles to ensure consistency of presentation by using a common format.[4][2] Originally, infoboxes (and templates in general) were used for page layout purposes.[2] An infobox may be transcluded into an article by specifying the value for some or all of its parameters.[5] The parameter name used must be the same as that specified in the infobox template, but any value may be associated to it.[5] The name is delimited from the value by an equals sign.[5] The parameter name may be regarded as an attribute of the article's subject.[6]

{{Infobox prepared food
	| name = 
	| image = 
	| image_size = 
	| caption = 
	| alternate_name = 
	| country = 
	| region = 
	| creator = 
	| course = 
	| type = 
	| served = 
	| main_ingredient = 
	| variations = 
	| calories = 
	| other = 
}}

{{Infobox prepared food
	| name = Crostata
	| image = Crostata limone e zenzero 3.jpg
	| image_size = 
	| caption = Crostata with lemon ginger filling
	| alternate_name = 
	| country = [[Italy]]
	| region = [[Lombardia]]
	| creator = 
	| course = [[Dessert]]
	| type = [[Tart]]
	| served = 
	| main_ingredient = Pastry crust, [[jam]] or [[ricotta]], fruit
	| variations = ''Crostata di frutta'', ''crostata di ricotta'', many other sweet or savoury variations
	| calories = 
	| other = 
}}

The infobox for the Wikipedia article Crostata rendered by a web browser engine on a desktop computer

The taxobox (short for taxonomy infobox) for the Wikipedia article Xuanhanosaurus rendered by a web browser engine (on Safari) on a desktop computer (iMac). A taxobox is a type of infobox which details the taxonomy of a specific life form or animal

On Wikipedia, an infobox is transcluded into an article by enclosing its name and attribute–value pairs within a double set of braces. The MediaWiki software on which Wikipedia operates then parses the document, for which the infobox and other templates are processed by a template processor. This is a template engine which produces a web document and a style sheet used for presentation of the document. This enables the design of the infobox to be separated from the content it manipulates;[2] that is, the design of the template may be updated without affecting the information within it, and the new design will automatically propagate to all articles that transclude the infobox.[4] Usually, infoboxes are formatted to appear in the top-right corner of a Wikipedia article in the desktop view,[3] or at the top in the mobile view.

Placement of an infobox within the wikitext of an article is important for accessibility.[7] A best practice is to place them following disambiguation templates (those that direct readers to articles about topics with similar names) and maintenance templates (such as that marking an article as unreferenced), but before all other content.[8][9]

Baeza-Yates and King say that some editors find templates such as infoboxes complicated,[10] as the template may hide text about a property or resource that the editor wishes to change; this is exacerbated by chained templates, that is templates transcluded within other templates.[10]

As of August 2009, English Wikipedia used about 3,000 infobox templates that collectively used more than 20,000 attributes.[11] Since then, many have been merged, to reduce redundancy. As of June 2013, there were at least 1,345,446 transclusions of the parent Infobox template,[12] used by some, but not all, infoboxes, on 4,251,127 articles.

The name of an Infobox is typically "Infobox [genre]"; however, widely used infoboxes may be assigned shorter names, such as "taxobox" for taxonomy.[8]

By presenting the basic facts of an article within an infobox, also allows the facts to be presented in a machine-friendly way allowing extra functionality such as when a link to a wikipedia is pasted into a compatible program, instead of just the link itself being posted other information such as the articles image is posted too.

Link to this article posting into Microsoft Teams and the application using the metadata from the infobox to make the link fuller by adding an image and summary text

• Kiran, Kumar N.; Santosh, G.S.K.; Varma, Vasudeva (June 2011). Multidisciplinary Information Retrieval. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 6653. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-21353-3. ISBN 9783642213533. ISSN 0302-9743. S2CID 9901886.
• Chutiporn, Anutariya; Domingue, John, eds. (2008). The Semantic Web: 3rd Asian Semantic Web Conference, ASWC 2008, Bangkok, Thailand, December 8-11, 2008. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 5367. Springer. ISBN 9783540897033. ISSN 0302-9743.
• Wu, Fei; Hoffmann, Ralph; Weld, Daniel s. (2008). "Information extraction from Wikipedia". Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining. Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 731–739. doi:10.1145/1401890.1401978. ISBN 9781605581934. S2CID 7781746.