Fixing templates

(English) This is an essay. It expresses the opinions and ideas of some Wikimedians but may not have wide support. This is not policy on Meta, but it may be a policy or guideline on other Wikimedia projects. Feel free to update this page as needed, or use the discussion page to propose major changes.

Let's fix templates!

Stuff (some) people dislike about templates

• Template syntax is terrible. Mitigation effort in Scribunto. Can we clean up template syntax? Deprecate some parser functions?
• Templates are hard to style. Mitigation effort started and abandoned in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Allow_styling_in_templates
• Templates are used for metadata, where other solutions could be better. Examples are
  • Media Viewer

    Of what is Media Viewer an example?

    • Of problems that arise when templates are used to codify metadata. MV fails to display proper licencing and attribution at times when intricate templates are used to supply them.

  • ...
• Templates make pages more difficult to parse in some cases. Parsoid has problems with that
• Templates are intricately interconnected, and difficult to selectively export. Having a MediaWiki "basic template pack" could be nice
• There is no interwiki template repository (GlobalTemplates, and Requests for comment/Global bits and pieces, and bugzilla:4547)
• There is no interwiki scribunto repository (bug 39610[1] (links from mw m w))
• Some template functions seem terribly convoluted, and could be discussed to be deprecated
  • unsubst
  • ...
• ...

Stuff (some) people love about templates

• Templates make it easy to insert a uniformly layed out element like an infobox in to many pages
• They're just wikitext - which can make them simple and transparent: everyone who understands wikitext understands template syntax.