Global templates/Status

2024

July 2024

Connecting Wikifunctions to Wikipedia: Opportunities and Challenges. A research report by Andrew Russell Green, for the Abstract Wikipedia Team, Wikimedia Foundation. The cited sentence appears on page 13, and most of the report is dedicated to the same problem

A research report on integrating Wikifunctions from Wikipedia finds the following: "The most common and most frustrating issue we heard about from participants is the mismatch of templates across WPs. Contributors often face this issue when translating using CX."

2023

January 2023

• The pages Taxonomy, Alternative solutions, and Transition are refreshed based on some recent discussion.
• The short version of the proposal is fully translated into Portuguese (European and Brazilian). Thanks to TiagoLubiana and DarwIn! {{🌎🌍🌏}}

2022

October 2022

• Presentation about the proposal at WikiArabia 2022. {{🌎🌍🌏}}

August 2022

• The brief version of the proposal is fully translated into Indonesian. Thanks to Daud I.F. Argana and Bennylin! {{🌎🌍🌏}}

June 2022

• New page, Global templates/Taxonomy. {{🌎🌍🌏}}

2021

October 2021

Slides in English and Russian for the presentation at WikidataCon 2021

• An online presentation and extended discussion at WikidataCon 2021: Global templates: Towards a New Age of Cross-wiki Data Collaboration (YouTube, English, about one hour).

Slides in English and French for the presentation at WikiConference North America 2021

• An online presentation and discussion about Global templates at Wiki-conference North America 2021:
  • Global templates at WikiConference North America 2021, video in English on YouTube (begins at 0 hours 21 minutes 50 seconds). The text in the slides is in English and French.
  • Global templates at WikiConference North America 2021, video in Spanish YouTube (begins at 30 minutes into the video).
  • Session notes and questions and answers {{🌎🌍🌏}}

September 2021

Slides in English and Russian for the presentation at Wiki-conference Russia 2021

• An online presentation and discussion in the Russian language about Global templates at Wiki-conference Russia 2021, Moscow (the relevant part in the YouTube video begins at 5 hours 13 minutes). {{🌎🌍🌏}}

August 2021

• The number of supporters on the Global templates/Discuss page crosses one hundred.

Slides for the Wikimania 2021 presentation (text in English in Russian)

• A session about Global templates and a somewhat related idea called Component templates by Adam Wight at Wikimania 2021: wikimania:2021:Submissions/Global templates, component templates. Session notes on Etherpad. The video is available on YouTube: Global templates, component templates - Wikimania 2021. {{🌎🌍🌏}}

July 2021

• Global templates were mentioned in the 2021–2022 Annual Plan Conversation with the WMF Product and Technology departments (the link leads to YouTube video recording; the relevant part begins at 18:34). Short summary of the CPO’s response: “Global templates fit with what we’re doing. We’re thinking of technical challenges and putting together a plan for the second half of this year. I agree it’s an impactful project. There are challenges around implementation and moderation. The relevant objectives are two, ‘Platform Evolution’ and one, ‘Thriving movement’ (ensure that Wikimedians have the systems they need to succeed and the tools and information to safely succeed).” {{🌎🌍🌏}}

May 2021

• A small, but significant update in the long version of the specification: The code of the templates in the central repository will use the generic English names of tags, parser functions, and magic words. (As follow-up to a discussion at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T30980#6949196.) {{🌎🌍🌏}}

February 2021

• As part of the Movement Strategy process, in the discussions of transition from strategy planning to execution, the topic of the need for cross-wiki tools in general and template re-use in particular was brought up by many people. See the page Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Transition/Follow-up events/Cluster B for more information.
• Work on implementing Translatable modules has begun. {{🌎🌍🌏}}

January 2021

• Ad Huikeshoven created m:Gathering support from local projects for global templates. {{🌎🌍🌏}}

2020

December 2020

• First draft of the Shared Citations proposal is posted. It is associated with the WikiCite initiative, and suggests standardization of citation data, and since citation are very often used as templates, such standardization is closely related to Global templates.
• A lightning talk on the importance of Global templates in the movement strategy was presented at the strategy Global conversations meeting on December 5. Transcript (translations: German, Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic, Chinese).
• A blog post in the Esperanto language about Global templates: Esperantisto proponas revoluciigi Vikimediajn ŝablonojn
• In the Community Wishlist Survey 2021, the wish titled “Templates translation” received the highest number of votes. It was also the wish with the highest number of votes in the history of the survey to date (December 2020), being the first ever to cross the 200 support votes mark. This community wish closely corresponds with some parts of the complete proposal, especially Automatic parameter translation. {{🌎🌍🌏}}

November 2020

Slides for the presentation at the Catalan wiki meeting (Viquitrobada), in English and Catalan

• A full presentation on Global templates at the online Catalan wiki meeting (speech mostly in English, slides in English and Catalan).

Video of the presentation “Global templates, now” in the Catalan wiki meeting (Viquitrobada), in English and Catalan.

• Several ideas that would be addressed by having a global templates repository are proposed at Community Wishlist 2021:
  • m:Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Miscellaneous/Templates translation
  • m:Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Archive/Codigo de citas mismo lenguaje
  • m:Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Archive/Traduceri Notițe
  • m:Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Untranslated/Шаблоны
  • m:Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Citations/Globalize CS1
  • m:Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Bots and gadgets/Easy and effective way to translate gadgets and userscripts
• In the collection of strategy priorities from movement stakeholders, the Swahili Wikipedia user group says this about templates: using templates etc from enwiki is still a pain in the ass. {{🌎🌍🌏}}

October 2020

Video presentation: Translatable modules - Better workflows for onwiki developers. Includes extensive Q&A.

Video presentation: The frontend of WikiCite

• “Cross-project tool development and reuse” is listed as one of the candidates of List of initiatives for prioritization as part of the Movement strategy project. More details and discussion at the page m:Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Transition/Discuss/Improve User Experience.
• The Translatable modules consultation is concluded. Translatable modules project and consultation summary presented at the Wikimedia CEE Online Meeting 2020: Translatable modules: Better workflows for onwiki developers.
• The presentation The frontend of WikiCite at the WikiCite 2020 Virtual conference includes some discussion of Global templates. {{🌎🌍🌏}}

September 2020

Video presentation about Translatable modules launch as part of the Language showcase

• The official Translatable modules consultation is launched. When completed, it will address the sections of the specification that deal with localization of modules. {{🌎🌍🌏}}

July 2020

• Global templates were mentioned and discussed extensively in the talk Wikidata-powered infoboxes by Paucabot as part of the virtual Celtic Knot 2020 conference.
• The proposal to develop Abstract Wikipedia a.k.a. Wikilambda, is approved as a WMF project. According to its plan, it may include a repository for Global templates and modules. {{🌎🌍🌏}}

June 2020

• Navigation box template added.
• The long version of the Proposed specification is fully translated into French . Merci Wladek92, VIGNERON, Aratal!
• Global templates and Wikilambda are briefly discussed at Wikimedia Clinic meeting #2. {{🌎🌍🌏}}

May 2020

Language showcase May 2020. Global templates are discussed at the 21 minutes mark.

• Language showcase in May 2020 included an audience question about the possibility of Global templates.
• The Proposed specification is fully translated into Turkish: short version, long version. Thank you, Baris6161TURK!
• Amir Aharoni is interviewed on the Between the Brackets podcast, and global templates is one of the major topics of discussion.
• The page Global templates/Alternative solutions is updated to reflect recent developments in the area of Wikilambda and Frontend Architecture that are relevant to global templates.
• Movement strategy May 2020 recommendations are published, and they include a recommendation to create Tools to connect cross-project and cross-language functionalities to provide an enhanced experience of the knowledge contained in the Wikimedia ecosystem and reusing community-developed software features in the Improve User Experience chapter. The page Global templates/Relationship to strategy is updated accordingly.
• Denny makes a more formal Wikilambda proposal, and its development plan includes a cross-wiki repository to share templates and modules between the WMF projects. {{🌎🌍🌏}}

April 2020

• Wikidata founder Denny publishes an article about his Multilingual Wikipedia proposal in the English Wikipedia Signpost. It directly mentions this proposal, and sparks some discussion. {{🌎🌍🌏}}

January 2020

• The short version of the specification was translated to Catalan and Finnish. Moltes gràcies, Townie, kiitos Susannaanas! {{🌎🌍🌏}}

2019

December 2019

• The short version of the proposal is now fully available into the six U.N. languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish. It is also available in German, Italian, and Esperanto. Enormous thanks to Sahaquiel9102, Dyolf77, 94rain, Framawiki, Irønie, Sannita, Eldad, Lucas Werkmeister, Mah3110.
• The long version of the proposal is now fully available in Russian.
• Some tangential discussion about this proposal on the Wikimedia-L mailing list. See December 2019 archive, thread “The wikisites looks like 1996”. {{🌎🌍🌏}}

November 2019

Amir Aharoni talks about Global templates at Wikimedia Technical Conference 2019

• The topic was discussed at a workshop with Language team members and Catalan Wikipedians. Catalan Wikipedians showcased their project to make templates that are reusable in all languages and can be relatively robustly translated, as well as examples of templates that embed structured data uniformly using Wikidata properties and data files.
• The proposal pages are no longer marked as “draft”. It is still not an official project, but there isn’t much more to write.
• The topic was discussed at the Wikimedia Tech Conf 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia as a part of Developer Productivity & onwiki tooling. Global templates was recommended by the participants as one of the leading solutions to the current issues with templates.
  • There was a good discussion about how this huge task could be divided into smaller and more manageable tasks that could be implemented independently.
  • It looks like there is consensus that the first thing to make global is modules, and once they become stable, templates can be considered.
• Amir cleaned up the subtasks and parent tasks of T121470. See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T121470#5661933 {{🌎🌍🌏}}

October 2019

• Added the pages Global templates/Relationship to strategy and Global templates/Alternative solutions as preparation for the Tech Conference.
• Amir E. Aharoni published Short draft spec and Long draft spec as wiki pages.
  • Mostly full translations are available into Italian and Hebrew. Partial translations are available in German, Russian, and French. Enormous thanks to the translators!
• The topic will be discussed at the Wikimedia Tech Conf 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia as a part of Developer Productivity & onwiki tooling. {{🌎🌍🌏}}

Related notable past milestones

This is a brief history of similar past proposals and attempts to implement them. If you know anything more, please add here!

• April 2019: The Multilingual Templates and Modules is started by Yurik to implement at partial support for templates and modules using bots
• October 2018, Tech Conf 2018: “Producing + prioritizing Global templates” was listed as an action item for Core Platform (T206056).
• September 2018: “A cross-project service to share templates” listed as one of the goals of Platform Evolution project.
• November 2017: Zaenon creates the similar Wikitemplates project proposal.
• February 2017: A similar proposal called m:Global-Wiki, is closed as “There're consensus for this proposal” (sic). It has less technical details, but the general idea is similar.
• December 2016: “Global gadgets” is voted #1 at the Community Wishlist Survey 2016. It’s not about templates, but it’s closely related.
• December 2015: “Central global repository for templates, gadgets and Lua modules” is voted #3 at the Community Wishlist Survey 2015.
• August 2012: MZMcBride reports a bug that says that Scribunto should support global module invocations (T41610), and starts the Shadow namespaces RFC as a consequence. The RFC is discussed on and off for several years by Legoktm, Brion VIBBER, Tgr, Duesentrieb and others, but repeatedly declared as “stalled”. (T91162)
• November 2008: Pfctdayelise creates the Template repository proposal with similar goals.
• January 2006: Melancholie reports Bugzilla bug 4547: Support crosswiki template inclusion (transclusion => interwiki templates, etc.) (T6547).
• July 2005: The Interwiki templates bug is resolved by River Tarnell (Kate Turner) by adding the $wgEnableScaryTranscluding feature, and with the comment “not live on WMF yet”.
• December 2004: The bug that asks for Interwiki templates is reported (T3126) by Brian.
• September 2004: Angela writes in the first version Wikispecies FAQ that “Features such as cross-wiki transclusion are being worked on”. {{🌎🌍🌏}}