Succession boxes

[Poetlister]

The succession box in biographies is a possibly useful feature. It shows a position held by the subject and who preceded and followed him or her in that position. However it is often used inconsistently. For example, for Peter Housden (T-H-L) there is a box for Permanent Secretary to the Scottish Government but not Permanent Secretary of the Department for Communities and Local Government.

[Wonderer]

Yeah, but they're probably too busy keeping up with "President" Trump's administration. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (T-H-L) is the "incumbent" White House Press Secretary (T-H-L) but she was in office "January 20, 2017 – July 26, 2017" and has been succeeded by Lindsay Walters. Something doesn't add up there.

Meanwhile, Anthony Scaramucci (T-H-L) was White House Director of Communications (T-H-L) after acting director Sean Spicer but before the current acting director Hope Hicks. Hope who?

[Rogol Domedonfors]

One great feature of the succession box is that the various constituent sub-templates individually emit malformed wiki markup: it's only when they're read in succession that you get legal markup codes. That breaks the new-fangled parser and make it harder for Visual Editor. So eventually they will have to be banned.

[Wonderer]

Oops, sorry, I got confused. Sarah Huckabee Sanders was Deputy Press Secretary and now she's Press Secretary. I think that's what I should have gotten from the infobox. Whether that's correct today, and whether it'll be correct tomorrow, I don't know.

It points up the risk of misinformation from half-reading Wikipedia articles. The information about Peter Housden might be correct but not presented all that well, but I could easily misunderstand it and then go on to spout some patently false fact to my friends who don't know much about Scottish government, or American government for that matter.

[Poetlister]

the current acting director Hope Hicks. Hope who?

Hope Hicks (T-H-L) has her own article. Apparently, she's now Trump's longest-serving political aide - a dubious honour. But no doubt she'll last for a while longer.

[thekohser]

Oops, sorry, I got confused. Sarah Huckabee Sanders was Deputy Press Secretary and now she's Press Secretary. I think that's what I should have gotten from the infobox. Whether that's correct today, and whether it'll be correct tomorrow, I don't know.

You'll likely enjoy our next blog post. Stay tuned.

[Rogol Domedonfors]

It is of course perfectly possible for succession boxes to become inconsistent if not updated in tandem. It would presumably be possible for the WMF developers to devise some clever piece of code that could be used to keep them all compatible. Somebody should ask for it.

[Poetlister]

It would presumably be possible for the WMF developers to devise some clever piece of code that could be used to keep them all compatible.

No doubt it's possible. Whether the WMF developers could do the job is a very different question.