MediaWiki

Global templates

Many of the most notable features of Wikimedia sites are implemented as templates and Scribunto Lua modules: Wikipedia Infoboxes and citations, maps, navigation headers on Wikisource and Wikibooks, conjugation tables in Wiktionary, deletion and merging procedures in multiple wikis, and thousands of others.

Even though many of these features are very prominent, there is a significant hurdle to their development and use: their code is stored separately on each wiki. While it gives the community of editors on each wiki the freedom to innovate and develop the templates that it needs, it makes it very inconvenient to collaborate on the development of templates that could be shared across wikis, to translate them, and to keep them up-to-date.

Over the years, there have been several proposals to make templates shared across wikis. Editors have requested this since 2004. On the technical side, there were Scary Transcluding, Shadow namespaces, and Multilingual Templates and Modules projects. It was also included, without a specific timeline, as one of the goals of Platform Evolution project. On the community side, the topic came up multiple times in the Community Wishlist Surveys, and received a lot of votes. Despite many discussions, these proposals were never fully implemented.

The problem remains, however, and needs to be resolved, but such a project requires wide organizational and community commitment. This page is an attempt to build such commitment.

In the wiki spirit of "no ownership", these pages belong to the community. Feel free to comment, edit, improve, discuss, express objections, etc. The more it is owned by the community, the better it will all be.

Other proposals of this kind

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