Which templates should be global?

Global-Wiki is a global container of wiki pages, to be linked and/or included from other wikis. It can include orientative templates.

Continuing some discussions that happened in 2017 in Phabricator, Wikimedia Hackathon, and Wikimedia Developers Summit, this is a question to the communities:

Which templates could be useful for all Wikimedia projects, or at least for many projects?

Background

For many years there have been a terrible phenomenon: templates with essentially identical or very similar functionality have to be created on each project (or family of projects) separately. For example: infoboxes, authority control, citations, userboxes, coordinates, and others. Since there is no central management of templates, they have to be replicated and localized manually and they quickly go out of sync. This makes them hard to debug and update. It's difficult to translate articles that include them. People get used to using a common template in a Wikipedia in their language, and then they are surprised that it works differently in Wikivoyage in the same language, or that it isn't available there at all. Every experienced editor of every Wikimedia project should be familiar with this problem, especially those who edit in more than one project.

Currently making templates truly global is not quite possible. There are several proposed technical solutions with different scary technical codenames, for example allowing "shadow namespaces" (as global:), or packing Lua modules as extensions, but before we get into these technicalities, a more user-level question must be asked: which templates should be global?

At least some templates should be local, because they are truly useful only in one language. But some really should be global. This is a wiki—please be bold and make this list longer, and add details and examples to existing items. Input from ALL projects and all languages is welcome:

List. To do

• Template:ping
• Template:tl
• Message boxes like
  • en:Template:Ambox
  • en:Template:Stub
  • en:Template:Underconstruction
  • en:Template:Warning
• en:Template:Authority control
• en:Template:Taxonbar
• {{Taxobox}}, most important, because we can use the data that we now have in Wikidata.
• en:Template:Column
• en:Template:Convert
• en:Template:Inflation
• en:Template:Sfrac
• Coordinates templates like en:Template:Coord
• Date templates like en:Template:Birth date and age and en:Template:Start date (ideally, they would all be rewritten as one template, probably using Lua)
• en:Template:Official website / en:Template:Official URL
• Infobox templates like en:Template:Infobox, en:Template:Infobox person, en:Template:Taxobox,
• en:Template:ISBN
• Language templates, like en:Template:Lang and en:Template:Lang-fr (one for each language)
• List formatting templates like en:Template:Plainlist
• Quotation paragraphs, like Template:Quote
• Template documentation templates like en:Template:Documentation / en:Template:Lua
• Template {{Wikipedia doc}} (in a global environment, must be in Meta (if related to Wikimedia sister projects) or Mediawiki (if shipped for all the wikis that uses the software).
• Templates about Wikidata, for use on other projects, like en:Template:Wikidata / en:Template:Wikidata property
• fr:Modèle:Bibliographie This is a wonderful citation template / module that the French Wikipedia has that extracts & displays citation data from Wikidata, but probably best translated into English. Syntax ex.: {{bibliographie|Q23906197}}
• ru:Module:Sources (wikidata:Q18007831) -- the main module in Russian Wikipedia and several other wikis to extract and render bibliographic references based on Wikidata claims. In Russian Wikipedia it's used in most of infoboxes and also provides templates like ru:Template:Source to generate citations from Wikidata items in a way similar to Cite Q (wikidata:Q22321052) and aforementioned Modèle:Bibliographie. It seems to be one of earliest and well-developed modules for such purposes.
• fr:modèle:Infobox Biographie2 Universal infobox for biographies, using Wikidata elements
• Citations (also known as references; often, but not always, it's the content of <ref> footnotes)/ The basic citations templates:
  • Cite web (wikidata:Q5637226)
  • Cite journal (wikidata:Q5624899)
  • Cite book (wikidata:Q92570)
  • Cite encyclopedia (wikidata:Q26052255)
  • Cite act (wikidata:Q6927001)
  • and other citations templates which are usually outdated in smaller wikis
  • Why not all module:CS1 templates?
• Resolved (wikidata:Q13365012) and others (see them here)
• en:Template:Pp (en:Module:Protection banner) and the variants.
• Yes (wikidata:Q13407605), No (wikidata:Q10998989)
• en:Template:Delete
• en:Template:Disambig
• en:Template:Font color
• en:Template:Main
• en:Template:Split
• en:Template:Reflist
• en:Template:Further information
• en:Template:See also
• en:Template:Unreferenced section
• en:Template:Refimprove
• Commons category, Wikibooks/Wiktionary/Wikisources entries related to the subject
• en:Template:Wikivoyage
• en:Template:Pronunciation (IPA) templates
• en:Template:Aligned table
• en:Template:Annotated image
• en:Template:Multiple image
• Basic alignment and formatting templates, like en:Template:Center, en:Template:Right, en:Template:Left, en:Template:Border, and similar templates.
• en:Template:Citation needed and similar templates, many of which are listed at en:Template:Inline cleanup tags
• {{translation possible}} and {{Convert to international}}, now in Commons.
• {{tl}} (to show a template) and {{tl2}} (to sister projects)
• TemplateData
• Wikidata templates (some of them used now in sister projects, to obtain data from Wikidata).
• WikiProject templates.
• {{online}} and {{online event}}
• Any templata that does not include in TemplateData or in documentation the parameter {{nogupdate}} (no global update).
• en:Template:Listen.
• Template:Online event

And any templates which the above require.

• en:Template:Interlanguage link
• en:Template:If mobile to allow workarounds for formatting that does not work on mobile

What else? Add above!

Needing links

• Navigation boxes inside Wikibooks and Wikisource books
• Wiktionary templates for tagging part of speech, language, etc.

Where begin

• Simpliest templates, preferly basic ones used as part of other templates.
• And / or the most used templates.

List. Done

Available set of "starter" templates, that new wiki installations can copy and use.

• Global:Template:Online event
• Global:Template:Warning

Update

In any case, using {{gupdate}}, would update the template and documentation from the Wikimedia central template repository (global:template:). --BoldLuis (talk) 17:52, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

Other things now also global

• User accounts: Meta accounts can be seen in all other sister projects.
• Wikidata, Mediawiki, Meta and Commons (they are central services for the other sister wikis).

See also

• Global-Wiki
• {{Global template}}
• Strategy:Proposal:Data.wikimedia.org
• mw:Template repository
• Lua-based templates
• Template:Wikipedia doc

External links

• Templates Wiki, a wiki collating wiki templates (for use on other Wikia wikis). Partially MediaWiki compatible.
• Miraheze Template Wiki, a non-WMF MW template repository.