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Which templates should be global?

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

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[1], 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

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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

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And any templates which the above require.

What else? Add above!

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

Where begin

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

List. Done

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

Update

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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)[reply]

Other things now also global

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  • 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

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Footnotes

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