Wikipedia:Article message boxes

A standard and consistent design for article message boxes has been selected. That is, message boxes or article templates that go on the top of articles and article sections.

Scope
The scope of this page and standardisation effort is the design of article message boxes. That is, message boxes that go on the top of articles and article sections. Other kinds of article templates such as navigation boxes and infoboxes are not included.

Talk page templates were already standardised last year, see Talk page templates.

Project namespace templates such as the box on the top of this page are not within the scope of this standardisation effort.

New design is ready
The CSS code and meta template are finished and we have now (September 2007) started to convert the old article message boxes to the new design. The design of these article message boxes is controlled by the ambox CSS classes in MediaWiki:Common.css.

The meta template ambox makes it easy to create article message boxes in the new design. It has usage documentation and examples. Note that ambox is just a thin wrapper for the CSS classes.

The CSS classes can also be used directly in a wikitable or HTML table, especially when special functionality is needed. The how-to guide Ambox CSS classes describes that.

Browser cache
If these two boxes don't look alike, you need to refresh your web browser cache:

This is a temporary caching problem that should be gone in some days.

Reasoning
The tags that we use to notify people of problems within an article are on thousands of our pages. Our readers see them and judgements are made not only about the article at hand but about the project itself. Currently we have a myriad of templates that often share some level of consistency but still look very mismatched.

The proposal below aims to address these issues. The thinking behind the design is:
 * It is colour-coded but without using an overpowering amount
 * Standard widths
 * Generally a better design than we have now
 * It is easily implemented

Colour code
Colour coding article message box templates will help to inform of the severity of the issues at a glance. Having a small amount of colour is best, as too much can be overwhelming.

Currently under discussion at the talk page:

Alternate skins
It is possible to customize the appearance of ambox templates by adding to or altering the code in your monobook.css page. There are several pre-made "skins" available for this at Ambox CSS classes/Skins.

Design
Please note:
 * The wording of these message boxes is not under discussion at this time. Initial implementation will use the text from the existing "production" templates.  The wording in the examples below is for illustration purposes only.
 * The following box has a white background to mimic article pages.

