Pikipedia:Navigation box guidelines

Shortcut: P:NAVBOX

The following guidelines describe how navigation boxes should be like. Because some navboxes may have a radically different format, not all rules here will apply to all templates.

General style

The navbox should be a table that has the "navbox mw-collapsible" classes. If the box is particularly large, it should also have the "mw-collapsed" class, so that it starts off minimized. Text on the navbox should try to be normal-sized; don't decrease the font size needlessly. If the navbox uses abnormal wiki colors, for both the background and the text, then make it also belong to the "navbox-light" or "navbox-dark" classes, for light-colored and dark-colored backgrounds, respectively. This will color the text and links in a way that will contrast with the background.

Table format

The table should start with one header line, with the title of the navigation theme, linking to the appropriate page or category. Then, there should be title columns to the left, and content columns to the right. If there's only one type of content, or the full list is small as it is, then you shouldn't have section columns to the left.

Links

The list of pages should be written using the template {{ni}}.

There should always be navigation items in text form – for navboxes that focus primarily on having icons as their navigatable content, the items should also exist in text form somewhere on the template, like right next to each icon, or as a list below the list of icons.

Categorizing

Infoboxes and navboxes may categorize the articles they are included on. If the articles that will be using these navboxes should also use infoboxes, then let the infobox categorize the article in the correct category. If not, then the navbox itself should categorize the page it's on.