Talk:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Document ALL the modules!

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Scope

The modules themselves are written by communities so I doubt WMF can or should document them. That said, providing an infrastructure that facilitates the documentation of modules (e.g. autogenerating pages to put documentation on for each function) can be within the scope of the wishlist. Nardog (talk) 06:31, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

I second with this. I'd support an auto generator, but I don't think it's in WMF scope to document modules on hundreds of wikis. A09|(pogovor) 20:55, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Disagree. The documenting modules request is out of scope, but making it easier is not. Currently, it is possible to let templatedata autofill all parameters used by a template that is not backed by a module, but it is not possible to autofill parameters from a module. It is very possible to make templatedata go over what parameters are used by a module, I even have a proof of concept written by myself that I use all of the time. Snævar (talk) 23:24, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

You don't actually disagree, then. Nardog (talk) 16:36, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

@Duckmather: Thanks for creating this wish. The existing module documentation mechanism is to transclude any /doc subpage (e.g. wikipedia:Module:Message box/doc) to show above the module code. Perhaps you could add more info about why this is not sufficient? Note also that the actual writing of documentation of modules is likely out of scope for the Wishlist (unless a module is created while fulfilling some other wish). SWilson (WMF) (talk) 23:50, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

@Nardog, A09, and SWilson (WMF): If I were to propose a specific technical way to fix this problem, it would be a tool, or maybe a MediaWiki extension, called "ModuleData" (analogous to the existing "TemplateData" tool). This would furnish structured, machine-readable data about each module, right on its documentation page, just as TemplateData furnishes structured, machine-readable data about each template, right on its documentation page. But Community Wishlist#How to write a good wish explicitly states that I should write the wish in such a way as to articulate a problem they face without providing an explicit solution (i.e. framing the wish as a problem, rather than as a solution), so I wrote my wish the way I did. Duckmather (talk) 03:02, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

Same problem for scripts & tools

Lack of documentation is also a problem for scripts and tools. Often there is no documentation page at all. I think what is needed here is the idea/proposal what to do about it. For example, there could be a script that shows all modules (& scripts?) without any documentation or with only very short documentation and then an automated ping to its creator requesting such on the talk page of each. For example, I'm still wondering what this script in category Commons tools does and how it differs from seemingly similar tools c:User:Antoine WMFr/CatUsage. There is a really severe lack of developers so the things that are being developed should be efficient (e.g. the same thing shouldn't be developed multiple times and things developed should be useful/findable). May make a new wish about that at some point and maybe you have some input but this is also about this wish about module documentation as it's very similar if not the same problem. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:45, 30 October 2024 (UTC)