Proposal:Global templates

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The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

Every proposal should be tied to one of the strategic priorities below.

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  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content
  3. Increase Participation
  4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
  5. Encourage Innovation


A feature request or bug related to this proposal has been submitted to Bugzilla under ID 4547.

See Category:Proposals with Bugzilla submissions for all submitted bugs.


See also: Proposal:Data.wikimedia.org

Summary

Global templates would make possible to create good looking and correct pages also in smaller Wikipedias.

Proposal

Wikimedia should host another global project similar to Commons. This project should develop a set of templates which could be usable in all Wikipedias (and/or other WM projects). Therefore these templates should be made universally. The global templates should be possible to call directly without copying them to the project where they are used.

The new project should provide js and default css files necessary for the developed templates as well.

Motivation

Nowadays, only local templates can be used in each project. Global templates which would be created by highly skilled programmers, would allow to use these templates also in smaller projects which do not have enough people to write them. The smaller projects suffer with a low quality of the template code which results into a difficult skinability and taking over our content. Many project lack wanted features which bigger project successfully use already several years.

Key Questions

  • Would be necessary to localize the global templates (names and parameters' names)?
    • How to localize them?
  • How to localize template text?

Potential Costs

  • developing background
  • developing the global templates themselves

References

  • Bugzilla 4547 Enable template inclusion from Commons (transclusion => interwiki templates, etc.)

Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:Global templates.

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