Template talk:Country info
DOCUMENTATION
Author: Xavi Contact: Talk page or wiki mail
As of 2007-01-30 the currently intended use of this template was to represent a sort of demographic summary of a country where the OLPC is planning to be deployed.
The template is a simple static table composed of labels (pre-defined) and values (entered as parameters). Although inspired in Wikipedia's country summary table, we lack some functionality that would allow a much more versatile summary box (ie: #if: which would allow the display or not of missing data - or so I believe).
NOTE: Please remember that fiddling or changing the template will impact in all its inclusions. So if a field is added/removed/modified, it must be checked against all the inclusions in order to be consistent - the power and danger of templates... ;)
About the fields
The list of fields was basically an improvisation, so the actual utility or relevance of that info is subject to review.
About the values
When the template is invoked, it is done with a series of parameters (or values). The sources of these values are the following:
- Statistical data
- is mainly a copy-paste of the data found in OLPC country statistics (as noted on that page, with the exception of Population Structure is basically extracted from the CIA Factbook). There are some exceptions.
- Decorative data
- Things like the official country name, languages, location image, and some other non-decorative data like HDI (Human Development Index) have Wikipedia as it source.
- Pedagogical data
- Mandatory school years, population attending school and such is not easily found and will probably have to be datamined from local or international sources.
How to edit the summary
Given the amount of space in a country page that all the parameters need for the invocation of the template, it has been extracted to a sub-page of the country. Currently located:
- country page/Country info
Another thing to note is that currently the image of a country's location has its quirks (which I haven't been able to elucidate) and sometimes the name of the image alters if it'll be rendered as a link or the image be displayed. (One thing I noticed when including images from Wikipedia is that if the link itself included Image if failed to render the image leaving behind the link - but can't guarantee this behavior).
