More precisely, there is a bit of a technical reason: very simply, such a repository would be itself a piece of software, and it was never completely developed.
There were some attempts to do it, with names such as "scary transclusion", "shadow namespaces", and maybe others, but they were never completed, at least not well enough for Wikimedia sites. There were issues of security, caching, localization, and more. It's possible to resolve these issues, but unfortunately it was never prioritized.
It would be VERY desirable to have such a central repository. While some templates are indeed site-specific, many could be reused by different Wikimedia projects and by other sites: infoboxes, citation references, unit conversion, chess games, coordinates, hatnotes, citation needed, and hundreds of others.
Exporting a template from another site is technically possible, but the process itself is far from convenient because many templates involve nested templates, and have dependencies on local CSS pages. Importing them completely is manual and tedious for the more complicated ones. Furthermore, it creates a fork, which is often not great.
I'd further argue that many templates could be converted to real extensions or even core features. For example, there's the Capiunto extension, which attempts to do it for infoboxes. It would be an even more robust solution, but perhaps a global templates repository is a good intermediate step.
בתאריך 13 בינו׳ 2018 03:22, "John Lewis" jl@hyperbolicinnovation.com כתב:
Hello everyone,
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Templates
Help:Templates says that there is no central repository for templates. Is there a technical reason for that?
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