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?
On Sat, 13 Jan 2018, at 9:21 AM, John Lewis wrote:
Help:Templates says that there is no central repository for templates. Is there a technical reason for that?
No technical reason against such a thing, I think, so much as that templates are very often quite site-specific and tied in to things like specific skins, site CSS or JS, and bureaucratic processes on particular wikis.
That said, you can grab a template from any MediaWiki wiki out there via the Special:Export page. This has a "Include templates" checkbox, that will make it download not only the template that you request but also all of the templates and modules on which it depends. (It won't get associated pages in other namespaces though, unless you list those explicitly.)
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?
MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
On Sat, 13 Jan 2018, at 2:34 PM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
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.
Yes! Definitely. I reckon there's lots to be said for widely-used templates actually being parser functions or lua modules (or whatever is appropriate) in extensions. It feels to me like once a template is useful enough and of enough of a general nature to be used on multiple sites, then it makes sense to move it into an extension. This means that modifications to it are more carefully made (i.e. can follow normal code review processes) and surprises are fewer for all the wikis using the feature.
It's similar with gadgets, I think. For example, HotCat is used all over the place, including with non-Wikimedia sites dynamically loading it from Commons, and would be great as an extension.
The downside of course is that extension-ified templates become much less easy for normal wiki-editors to modify, but I guess if a template is used on lots of sites that could also be seen as a reasonable thing.
I don't think a global template repository is an intermediate step, though. It sounds like it's much more complicated than piecemeal extensionification.
On Fri, Jan 12, 2018 at 10:35 PM Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
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.
^^ This ^^
Basically: nobody ever had the time to drive it to completion. There's no technical reason it couldn't be done.
-Chad
On Sun, 2018-01-14 at 12:59 +0000, Chad wrote:
On Fri, Jan 12, 2018 at 10:35 PM Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
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.
^^ This ^^
Basically: nobody ever had the time to drive it to completion. There's no technical reason it couldn't be done.
-Chad
What license would make sense to distribute templates under?
On Sun, Jan 14, 2018 at 5:35 AM John Lewis jl@hyperbolicinnovation.com wrote:
On Sun, 2018-01-14 at 12:59 +0000, Chad wrote:
On Fri, Jan 12, 2018 at 10:35 PM Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
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.
^^ This ^^
Basically: nobody ever had the time to drive it to completion. There's no technical reason it couldn't be done.
-Chad
What license would make sense to distribute templates under?
I would assume something Create Commons so as to be most compatible with Wikimedia wikis, but that's a trivial implementation detail.
-Chad
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