Yes, and that's why I really, really, really want to hear more feedback on
it from various communities of editors, including criticism. That's also
why in my proposal I write that it's a requirement that communities must be
able to override any central functionality, and I only speak about the
generic principle of making templates global, mentioning particular
templates only as examples. I leave everything else to the communities.
The parts about which I wrote that they will have to be done mostly by
staff are the parts that require heavy PHP coding, code review, and
testing, and as far as I know, most of the people who know the relevant
areas of code well are on staff. (I might be wrong. Also, everything I'm saying
here are my own assessments, and they don't represent the WMF in any way.)
However, the more volunteer developers and editors participate in it, the
better—not because it saves money, but because it makes the project more
"owned" by the community.
בתאריך שבת, 14 בדצמ׳ 2019, 09:12, מאת John Erling Blad <jeblad(a)gmail.com>om>:
I get a little scared when I read “probably, but not
necessarily,
mostly by staff” because all kind of central standardization creates a
whole lot of arguing in the individual subprojects. If that
standardization means changing a whole lot of templates I'm afraid it
will create much more fighting than real solutions. I'm a little
“Marvin” here…
On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 10:14 AM Amir E. Aharoni
<amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
בתאריך יום ה׳, 12 בדצמ׳ 2019 ב-23:37 מאת Pine W <
wiki.pine(a)gmail.com
>:
> I'm thinking out loud here. Are there any estimates of would be
required
in
> terms of time (both staff time and community
time) and money to make
> templates and other tools be much easier to globalize across wikis and
> across skins? I'm looking for an answer that is more specific than "a
lot",
but
isn't a promise or a detailed estimate.
Difficult to say.
I won't make an actual time estimation, because I'm very bad at doing it,
and because I have too many conflicts of interest ;)
However, I do hope to give you something more specific than "a lot". I
envision the following feasible plan for "global modules and templates,
phase 1":
* Make a localization framework for modules. (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238417 ; probably, but not
necessarily,
mostly by staff)
* Develop a documentation page and a framework for making robust modules
(
necessarily,
mostly by staff).
* Make modules storable and loadable from a global repository, and
*actually enable it on all Wikimedia projects* (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T41610 ; probably, but not
necessarily,
mostly by staff).
* Migrate most local modules from all the wikis to using global modules,
and deleting all the migrated local modules. This will have to be done by
the editors communities in many wikis, and it will only be feasible if
all
the points above are planned and executed well.
The challenges I expect
at
this step are:
** Making sure that just the right amount of things are global and
everything that communities want to override locally can be conveniently
overridden.
** Making tough choices about which modules to use when several
communities
developed modules with similar functionality. For
example: English,
French,
Russian, Spanish, and Hebrew Wikipedias have
modules for loading Wikidata
values. They aren't the same, but they probably should be. Merging them
into a global module will require a lot of good-faith collaboration.
Note that I only mentioned modules. Templates have some extra challenges.
But once modules are done well, a "phase 2" of this project, that would
tackle templates, will become possible. Also, global gadgets will have to
be a separate project. Maybe the same localization framework can be used
for both modules and gadgets, but I cannot think of anything else that
they
really have in common.
All of the above is my interpretation of discussions in the recent Tech
Conf in Atlanta (other people may have a significantly different
interpretation). See these Phab tasks, and the web of other tasks linked
to
them:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T234661
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T52329
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