Community Wishlist Survey 2015/Templates

This page is translatable, but you can only vote on the English version.

Voting instructions:

• Voting begins on Monday, November 30th and will end on Monday, December 14th.
• Any user with at least 100 edits on any project is eligible to vote. See participation requirements for more details.
• Positive votes marked with  Support and signature will be counted as the proposal's tally. There's no limit to the number of proposals for which you may cast support votes.
• Comments marked Neutral or  Oppose are acceptable, in order to ask clarifying questions or raise potential problems for discussion, but they will not be counted as negative votes.
• Please do not add new proposals to this page; the proposals phase ended on November 22nd.

Central Global Repository for Templates, Lua modules, and Gadgets

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T41610

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T1238

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T91162

We could use a single location where to keep templates, Lua modules, and Gadgets that are used on all the wikipedia projects. Just like images from commons can be used on other projects, code from such site would be visible to all the projects. The current system of 100's of out of sync copies of the same templates or Lua modules occasionally synchronized with the original is very hard to maintain. --Jarekt (talk) 20:06, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Earlier discussion and endorsements
Endorsed --Jarekt (talk) 20:06, 10 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed. See also mw:Extension:Gadgets/Roadmap. Helder 20:53, 10 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed —MisterSynergy (talk) 21:10, 10 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed Danmichaelo (talk) 21:25, 10 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed A best-of-breed centralised Lua toolkit for Wikidata is particularly needed. Jheald (talk) 22:53, 10 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed--Shizhao (talk) 02:32, 11 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed Amir (talk) 10:13, 11 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed Having spent entirely too much time lately shuffling templates, template docs, and modules from one project to another as I tried to use them and discovered they didn't exist locally, I say an emphatic "yes" to this! Fluffernutter (talk) 17:30, 11 November 2015 (UTC) I think that phab:T91162 ("Shadow namespaces") is also related, since it proposes a concrete mechanism for implementing a global repository. Cscott (talk) 19:31, 11 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed It would redeem smaller wiki-projects --Usien6 (talk) 19:47, 13 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed. --Stegop (talk) 19:58, 13 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed Very nice idea! --Sampayu (talk) 20:18, 14 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed While one central "Global Repository" would be valuable, even better is if we can transclude a generic page from any sister-wiki. With the recent development of SUL, the recent development of special translation support, and the current work on cross-wiki notifications, the ability to "locally-write" information for cross-wiki work and have it "locally displayed" on another wiki opens revolutionary opportunities. One of the most immediate Use Cases would be for the WMF to simply post Project announcements (and this Wishlist survey!) on a WMF-local announcement page. The page(s) would be displayed in sections at EnWiki Village Pump elsewhere. Local wikis could then apply the new translation features. This functionality is very valuable to the Community, and it's a huge boon for the plans at WMF_product_development_process. Alsee (talk) 12:13, 15 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed Some valuable templates are only available in few projects. Having a central repo for templates would make all the projects benefit of all templates. Moreover, this would remove all potential duplicates of code. That said, the migration to a central repo should be done with care (converging similar templates to a unique one, removing all unneeded templates, ...). Bibi6 (talk) 15:53, 15 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed Please, please, please. With proper code review (ideally, a git bridge with gerrit code-review on top of it and a way to test candidate changesets directly on-wiki) — Arkanosis ✉ 16:30, 18 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed 4nn1l2 (talk) 00:09, 19 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed --Jane023 (talk) 12:55, 19 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed --Susannaanas (talk) 16:26, 20 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed This would be really useful! Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 18:50, 20 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed YuviPanda (talk) 09:53, 22 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed -- Stephan Kulla (talk) 14:40, 22 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed --Voll (talk) 15:52, 27 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed as per my proposal. This would eliminate duplication of work and will allow multilingual support. A great opportunity to bring together the relatively much smaller community of people who understand the templates, people who will direct their energy in creating new, easier better templates, rather than duplicating / updating templates from other wikipedias. --FocalPoint (talk) 21:15, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Votes

1.  Support 4nn1l2 (talk) 03:24, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
2.  Support MisterSynergy (talk) 09:10, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
3.  Support --Tobias1984 (talk) 11:34, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
4.  Support Goldzahn (talk) 12:46, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
5.  Support As a prerequisite for a centralised gadget repository, the long-running "Gadgets 2.0" project needs to be finished off, which is something I'd also like to see Community Tech work on as part of this wishlist item (should it pass the voting phase). This, that and the other (talk) 13:25, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
6.  Support soon or later a centralised repository of this items has to be offered.--Alexmar983 (talk) 16:32, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
7.  Support. --Stryn (talk) 19:14, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
8.  Support Orlodrim (talk) 20:19, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
9.  Support Grind24 (talk) 20:37, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
10.  Support Voll (talk) 21:47, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
11.  Support --° (Gradzeichen) 22:03, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
12.  Support --UV (talk) 23:16, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
13.  Support --Leyo (talk) 23:19, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
14.  Support --provided that local communities can always override anything from the repository. xaosflux ^Talk 00:28, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
15.  Support --EugeneZelenko (talk) 00:49, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
16.  Support per TTO John Vandenberg (talk) 01:51, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
17.  Support--Shizhao (talk) 09:44, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
18.  Support--Purodha Blissenbach (talk) 10:11, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
19.  Support --Oetterer (talk) 10:52, 1 December 2015 (UTC) and pretty, pretty please make it portable to user maintained wiki families
20.  Support --Steinsplitter (talk) 11:25, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
21.  Support --mfb (talk) 12:29, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
22.  Support -- Amir (talk) 12:50, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
23.  Support --Arnd (talk) 14:57, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
24.  Support Matiia (talk) 15:08, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
25.  Support - Whaledad (talk) 15:21, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
26.  Support --Continua Evoluzione (talk) 15:22, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
27.  Support Sadads (talk) 16:14, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
28.  Support Snipre (talk) 16:01, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
29.  Support JackPotte (talk) 16:20, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
30.  Support --Silraks (talk) 16:22, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
31.  Support Goombiis (talk) 16:35, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
32.  Support Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:44, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
33.  Support -- Singhalawap (talk) 16:57, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
34.  Support --Dodi123 (talk) 17:12, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
35.  Support Papuass (talk) 17:33, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Inserting templates (tables) in PDF and Books

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T73808

Since... well, don't know since when, books and PDFs are not rendering information inside templates. As lots of information is inside templates (also happens with tables) all of this is not rendered when you download the file in PDF. -Theklan (talk) 22:18, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Earlier discussion and endorsements
I think that it comes from the templates, some of them contain the "class=noprint" because the local community decided it. But if you want to generate some books with their recurrent templates (eg: disclaimer), dynamically from its table of content, I recommend you to export my Lua module. JackPotte (talk) 23:11, 9 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed Taha (talk) 00:18, 10 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed @JackPotte, the problem it's not the "class=noprint", the current pdf engine is especially buggy in rendering table and dont show template containing table (like infobox). On november 2014 a message from Erik Moeller on wikitech ambassors mailing list describe the current status and said that is not a high priority project to fix them.--Moroboshi (talk) 07:30, 10 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed--Bramfab (talk) 18:05, 11 November 2015 (UTC) As the author of the PDF backend, I can confirm that the issue is not with templates, it is with tables. We have a large number of very complicated tables in our projects, and it is a non-trivial task to figure out how to lay them out in LaTeX. Basic patch here: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/107587 -- but it would break more pages than it would help at this point. Help wanted, of course! But it would be even better to write an HTML-based PDF backend for mw:OCG and bypass LaTeX altogether. Hopefully we could use phantomjs 2.0 and not lose the nice support for Indic languages that we currently have. Cscott (talk) 18:39, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

Votes

1.  Support בנימין (talk) 07:35, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
2.  Support Very much non-trivial to fix. But Collection/OCG is essentially unmaintained, so it would be nice for Community Tech to take this on and fix our half-baked PDF generation system. This, that and the other (talk) 13:26, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
3.  Support Table support should have been part of the MVP. John Vandenberg (talk) 01:54, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
4.  Support --Purodha Blissenbach (talk) 10:12, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
5.  Support - Whaledad (talk) 15:21, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
6.  Support JackPotte (talk) 16:22, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
7.  Support -- Singhalawap (talk) 16:58, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

A powerful, handy TemplateTiger

Currently, TemplateTiger feeds on dumps and is very unhandy, if you are dealing with high-use templates. Therefore please, oh WMF, please provide a tiger which prowls through templates live and which can be piloted as easy as catscan (when it's available). → «« Man77 »» ^[de] 18:40, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Earlier discussion and endorsements
Endorsed Having a live version would definitely be useful. Other things that would be useful for maintenance are detection of invalid parameters (I maintain a similar tool that provides this for frwiki, but unfortunately, I don't have resources and time to run it for any other wiki). Orlodrim (talk) 19:04, 10 November 2015 (UTC)  Endorsed —MisterSynergy (talk) 21:07, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Votes

1.  Support MisterSynergy (talk) 09:10, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
2.  Support PerfektesChaos (talk) 11:35, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
3.  Support Orlodrim (talk) 20:19, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
4.  Support --Leyo (talk) 23:19, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
5. Comment No matter how optimized such a tool may be, it'll surely feed on dumps. --Ricordisamoa 06:54, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
6.  Support I don't expect a live version to be more time-consuming than some expensive regex searches. --mfb (talk) 12:32, 1 December 2015 (UTC)