Community Wishlist Survey 2020/Archive/Transclude wikipedia template, module pages on small project as Wikiversity
Transclude wikipedia template, module pages on small project as Wikiversity
Outside the scope of Community Tech
- Problem: On Wikiversity as on other small wikimedia online projects, we don't have a user community big enough to compete with Wikipedia template and module creation. So we must usually import them from Wikipédia. Especialy on Wikivesity because the pedagogical project is very close to the encyclopedic one in term of edition. Same bibliographic citation for instance. Actually, the import and update work make by administrator is not easy. We are doing this with the page special:import and it's a real nightmare if we want to merge history of pages in the respect of the license and the transparency.
- If a page name already exist on wikiversity with an other contain or function, the import overwrites the old page to establish the new one. By the way, trouble on the website organization can arise (example of conversation that appear in French Wikiversity after a template importation : https://fr.wikiversity.org/wiki/Sujet:V8jhz8s6sp17evpx).
- Actually, the import option « Include all models » of the page special:import is really risky because of that. Finally the template or module pages must be frequently updated due to their evolution on Wikipedia and that's also a difficulty for administrators to make this repetitive task.
- Who would benefit: Wikiversity and potentially other small wiki administrators and users.
- Proposed solution: Extension:InterwikiExtracts permits to transclude articles from one Wikimedia project to another but unfortunately not template or module pages. A similar MediaWiki extension for template and module could be so a very powerful tool for enhancing collaboration and contain integration between all Wikimedia project. That's also a good way for not duplicate content from one project to an other and to concentrate the force of all Wikimedia technical contributors on single pages and single place. In the long run, a multi language Wikimedia technical commons, similar to Wikimedia Commons but for gathering template, modules, gadgets, and other technical wiki pages available for all projects and transcludable with an exention as scary transclusion could be a great idea!
- More comments:
- Phabricator tickets:
- Proposer: Lionel Scheepmans ✉ Contact French native speaker, sorry for my dysorthography 00:39, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
Discussion
- You should have a look at mw:Global templates/Draft spec/TLDR. 😊 Jon Harald Søby (talk) 00:07, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
- This is a very important issue that affects every small project. --Andrew Krizhanovsky (talk) 18:26, 1 November 2019 (UTC)
- This kind of request was at the very top of the Community Wishlist 2016, but for some reason was declined. InterwikiExtracts is useful for reusing text content (demo 1, demo 2, demo 3) but is not adequate for reusing templates, modules or gadgets. It simply won't work (demo: part 1, part 2). That being said, I don't quite understand why scary transclusion is not enabled on Wikimedia projects. The documentation page says it's somewhat inefficient. Is that the reason? If so, then I wonder if the computational resources it costs are more than the volunteer resources that not enabling it costs! Sophivorus (talk) 13:25, 4 November 2019 (UTC)
- Indeed, attempts to solve this problem before have not been fruitful. phab:T121470 is the parent task and goes into some detail. This topic has discussed in depth at the Wikimedia Technical Conference, so perhaps it will soon gain traction. At any rate, as we discovered when working on the 2016 wish, it is a long-term effort that unfortunately Community Tech can not afford. For this reason I'm going to archive this proposal as out of scope. Apologies for any disappointment, and thank you for your participation in the survey! MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 15:49, 15 November 2019 (UTC)