Ethology is part of the WikiProject Biology, an effort to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to biology on Wikipedia. Leave messages on the WikiProject talk page.BiologyWikipedia:WikiProject BiologyTemplate:WikiProject BiologyBiology articles
Ethology is within the scope of WikiProject Animals, an attempt to better organize information in articles related to animals and zoology. For more information, visit the project page.AnimalsWikipedia:WikiProject AnimalsTemplate:WikiProject Animalsanimal articles
It will not have escaped people's attention that the great majority of navigation boxes are now sober bars at the ends of articles, not sideboxes. In the case of this one, the Ethology article itself already has Template:Sociobiology and Template:Animal communication bars as well as this template, so it would make more sense to have all three bars together at the bottom.
Having the Ethology navbox as a bar like all these others will:
harmonise the look and feel of the articles
enable the boxes to be grouped and if need be hidden/shown as a group
enable boxes to be auto-collapsed when more than one is present in an article
make it clear to users where navigation support is to be looked for
make clear the overlapping nature of categorisation of the articles (and of the sciences)
reduce clutter in the main text area of the articles
enable expansion or additional hierarchical restructuring of the template's lists
I propose therefore to replace the Ethology sidebox with a bar navbox offering the same entries as now, indeed it will use the identical list structure. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:53, 19 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Some time has gone by, and the rationale for this seems no less cogent, indeed sideboxes are now a rarity and navboxes the effective standard, so perhaps the time has come to boldly go, etc. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:52, 13 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Side bars can work when something is truly "part of series" as the former sidebar stated, but too often navboxes (vertical or horizontal) become merely a box to shoehorn as many articles as possible, a "see also: everything", which in turn leads to over applying the templates (The template is currently on over 100 articles!). I'm fine with the change to horizontal navbox, but its change now severely disrupts the layout of every article it appears in unless it is at the bottom. Ethology is a large, diverse topic which is contrary to the ideal functionality of navboxes: just how many of the articles in Category:Ethology should be in it? --Animalparty-- (talk) 23:03, 16 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Er, I made the change already, and went through all the articles moving the bar to the bottom. Actually I found several articles in the template that had no navbox, so they now have an unobtrusive bar instead, presumably, of a deleted sidebox. As for the size, it seemed pretty small compared to some. Chiswick Chap (talk) 06:54, 17 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
As the creator of the nav box it might help to explain my motivation behind this. I am an ethologist and also a photographer. It seemed to me that many articles on ethology did not have a suitable identifying lead image. (Many probably could NOT have a suitable one due to photographic constraints.) So, I created the montage of images to add to articles on ethology to show they were part of a series. The navigation aspect was secondary. I am now seeing ethology-related articles popping up with the nav box collapsed but at the top of the article.__DrChrissy (talk) 11:04, 17 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry to hear that. I checked all the articles that are listed in the box itself; if you can indicate which other articles have the box (on my talk page, say), I'll have a look through the 'what links here', and I'll happily tidy them up and add them to the box's contents. Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:07, 17 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
It seems like a bunch of articles should be added to this template, although it is unclear what is appropriate. As many of you probably know, the partition of branches in biology is rather transparent. For example, I feel Sexual cannibalism and Sexual dimorphism are good candidates for inclusion in this template.
