Grants:IdeaLab/Great lost of effort with template creation on Wikimedia projects

Idealab

Great lost of effort with template creation on Wikimedia projects

Template creation is not trivial, and there are a lot of templates that could be used in Wikipedias for other languages, if the creation process would be better designed.

idea creator• Sae1962

community organizer• Sae1962

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created on18:30, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Project idea

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

Template creation could be made more efficient. Creating more or less the same templates on different Wikis is a waste of time, results in code duplication and is also a waste of ressources.

What is your solution?

Template creation could be made more centralised in another Wikiproject (call it Wikitemplate). Once created on that platform, it should be possible to access this template with a so-called language stub that uses the functionality from all projects like Wikibooks, Wikipedia, Wiktionary etc., and the "users" of this template just have to make the proper translation of parametres & of the template documentation.

Goals

Brainstorming of designers should make the problem and a possible solution possible. It is a fact that we recreate more or less the same template over and over again. What the Wikis really need for a special functionality is a different access to one and the same template.

There are several issues that could be eased with the new solution:

1. Centralisation of design: This solution is discussed and voted by everybody who asked for this template
2. Centralisation of implementation: The solution of template issues would be solved at a centralised project, where the template designers experts find the best solution.
3. Create once, use everywhere: Once created, the template is at disposal for all Wikipedia projects. No recreation or difficult translations of difficalt-to-read template code is the past then.

Examples

The page JavaScript does include a Template:Infobox programming language. If one goes to the same page on another Wiki, this person will be encountered by similar templates that may have been somehow derived from this English template, like Vorlage:Infobox Programmiersprache, or قالب:معلومات لغة برمجة; the translation to Chinese is still not very successful (Template:Infobox programming language). Currently, the template translation process includes also modifications inside the not so trivial code, which makes the process a complicated issue; especially, some templates are split up in several parts, like "top", "body", "bottom" etc. The result is partly translated templates, which do not have all the functionality.

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Participants

• Community organizer Organise the project and get involved in code design & implementation, if necessary. Sae1962 (talk) 18:56, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

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