Template talk:Infobox cooperative

Suggestions

Nice to borrow the code from {{Infobox company}}. A couple of thoughts:

1. Link "Type" to Cooperative instead of to Category:Types of companies.
2. Have a shorter piece of "meta info" than the entire {{Co-operatives}} series navbox
3. An entry for "Members" - number of members is very interesting, even though co-ops have a hard time distinguishing dormant accounts from active members.
4. An entry for "Total dividends" - much more interesting than net income (after-tax profit) for a co-op
5. An entry for "Trading area" - where co-ops in the same industry agree trading areas so as not to compete with one another
6. For a merged business, can we agree that the foundation date be that of the oldest component of the merger, or the date of the most recent merger?

What do you think? --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 21:27, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

• I agree that the navigation box is unwieldly and could be much shorter. Perhaps it can be shortened to the Rochdale Principles and the basic company information. The political and economic theories and key theorists sections seem appropriate on the main page about cooperatives, but don't feel particularly useful on every page that is about a cooperative.
• I would like to see a separate infobox template for different types of cooperatives, allowing for different information for each subtype. For instance, a line to list the number of members makes a lot of sense for a consumer or housing cooperative, but less so for the other categories. Gobonobo 21:59, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

I've added a line for members. However, I do understand the problem of quoting active members. Richard ^{( T | C )} 17:52, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Well done Richard. I'm using the new features already. Gobonobo ^{T C} 04:52, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

• As well as the foundation date, do you think it would be a good idea to have a date when, where applicable, the Society ceased to exist? I'm thinking of this for use on the United Co-operatives article but I believe it could come into use for a good number of other articles. Richard ^{( T | C )} 18:13, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Good idea, I like :) - AmishThrasher 12:08, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

• I've been doing a fair bit of research on UK Co-operatives to add to the Co-op UK article. It was devised in my head as a simple table. However, it seems now to be taking on too much detail for easy presentation. I am now thinking that the information may well be better suited as forming part of this Infobox. Take a look at what I've done so far at User:R.carroll/co-ops but please do bear in mind that it is very much work in progress.

What do you think to adding categories to the Infobox for the number of different trading outlets an individual society has? I see both pros and cons to the idea (a major con being that it will not be relevant to a great number of articles where the Infobox is placed yet they don't need to be completed)

Going back to my original reason for doing the research, filling the Co-op UK article with Infoboxes would be messy, unnecessary and confusing to casual readers so I am a little unsure of where to take this research! Help and advise on my quandary would be greatly appreciated.

Finally, I thought I may as well join the Project. Richard ^{( T | C )} 00:22, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Request for addition

Could a "Total Assets" box be added to categories as in Template:Infobox Company? This is a helpful and useful statistic for co-ops like credit unions. DirectorStratton (talk) 03:15, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Updated template

I brought the template in line with Template:Infobox company, which means:

• we're now on par with other companies in terms of fields (including structured location information, and much more)
• the parameter naming is now the same as in the other Infobox
• the whole difference is the "members" parameter instead of the "owner" parameter

I cleaned up every single article using the template so their use of the template is updated, standardized and corrected in some ways (has been a lot of work...).

We can now take the decision whether we want to merge to 'Infobox company' after a 'members' parameter is added there or if we rather want to stay independent, adding, changing or removing some more subtle features to serve cooperatives. I'm tending to the former, because I don't see in general big structural differences between companies with a cooperative ownership and other companies. However, I'd be happy to be convinced that these differences exist and need to be served by a different Infobox.

A third, very appealing, option would be to modularize the infoboxes, so we don't keep adding often unneeded parameters to Template:Infobox company, yet become more flexible without creating redundancies that have to be continuously cleaned up. This would mean we'd have just a trunk template 'new Infobox company' containing just the parameters all companies need. And then we have child templates adding, changing or removing parameters to the trunk depending on the specific needs. Some examples:

• cooperatives would have a 'members' parameter instead of the 'owner' parameter
• defunct companies have some parameters added (such as 'defunct' or 'fate') and maybe others removed.
• listed corporations would have additional parameters such as 'free float', 'major shareholders', 'stock exchange' and 'stock exchange code'
• publisher companies might have their 'genre' parameter and possibly more
• rail companies would have some of the stuff in Template:Infobox rail company
• state owned companies might have completely different parameters on financial figures
• dotcom companies would have all they seem to need, see Template:Infobox dotcom company

etc.
Technically, the child template would call the trunk template passing the necessary parameters and add additional ones. There would be some details we'd need to figure out, but from a semantical perspective this would make much sense. How do you think?

Cheers, PanchoS (talk) 11:01, 19 February 2010 (UTC)