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; 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. Usually, infoboxes are formatted to appear in the top-right corner of a Wikipedia article in the desktop view, or at the top in the mobile view.
As of August 2009, English Wikipedia used about 3,000 infobox templates that collectively used more than 20,000 attributes. 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, 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.
About 44.2% of Wikipedia articles contained an infobox in 2008, and about 33% in 2010. Automated semantic knowledge extraction using machine learning algorithms is used to "extract machine-processable information at a relatively low complexity cost". However, the low coverage makes it more difficult, though this can be partially overcome by complementing article data with that in categories in which the article is included. The French Wikipedia initiated the project Infobox Version 2 in May 2011.
Knowledge obtained by machine learning can be used to improve an article, such as by using automated software suggestions to editors for adding infobox data. The iPopulator project created a system to add a value to an article's infobox parameter via an automated parsing of the text of that article.
Machine extraction creates a triple consisting of a subject, predicate or relation, and object. Each attribute-value pair of the infobox is used to create an RDF statement using an ontology. This is facilated by the narrower gap between Wikipedia and an ontology than exists between unstructured or free text and an ontology.
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 article is pasted into a compatible program, instead of just the link itself being posted other information such as the articles image is posted too.
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Broughton 2008, p. 18. - Broughton, John (2008-07-14). Barber, Nan; Meyers, Peter (eds.). Wikipedia – The Missing Manual. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 9780596553777.
Broughton 2008, p. 18. - Broughton, John (2008-07-14). Barber, Nan; Meyers, Peter (eds.). Wikipedia – The Missing Manual. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 9780596553777.
Baeza-Yates & King 2009, p. 30. - Baeza-Yates, Ricardo; King, Irwin, eds. (2009). Weaving services and people on the World Wide Web. Springer. ISBN 9783642005695. LCCN 2009926100. https://lccn.loc.gov/2009926100
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The English Wikipedia policy about accessibility is specified in the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility. The policy about wikitext layout is specified at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Layout and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section. /wiki/English_Wikipedia
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The project is hosted on the French Wikipedia page Infobox/V2. /wiki/French_Wikipedia
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Baeza-Yates & King 2009, p. 31. - Baeza-Yates, Ricardo; King, Irwin, eds. (2009). Weaving services and people on the World Wide Web. Springer. ISBN 9783642005695. LCCN 2009926100. https://lccn.loc.gov/2009926100
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