בתאריך יום ו׳, 13 בדצמ׳ 2019 ב-2:13 מאת Nick Wilson (Quiddity) < nwilson@wikimedia.org>:
On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 5:26 PM Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
The main problem I see with that is that is changing all the on-wiki templates and scripts that work with the current skin. There is also a question of opportunity: with less and less desktop users, it just makes more sense to invest in the mobile experience (and the beta mode there is super cool, but still breaks some templates).
Templates that still have problems on mobile at some wikis, can usually be fixed with the assistance of this page (especially section #12)
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Recommendations_for_mobile_friendly_articles_... -- I'll be sending a reminder to a few VillagePumps about this in the next few weeks.
The instructions on this page are probably correct, but the practical problem with this attitude is that to actually get it to work, it has to be discovered, read, understood, and acted upon by people from 900 wikis, and much less than half of these wikis have people who have the necessary programming skills to do all of this. And, as you say, you need to say reminders.
This is different from extensions, which are developed once and used everywhere. The only thing that needs to be done to make them fully usable is translating them, which is a reasonable thing to request. Some extensions, such as Citoid and Wikilove, do need local adaptations to actually be useful, but these are exceptions that prove the rule: it would be better if these local adaptations weren't needed.
That's why templates need to be global, so that there will be a repository of templates that are written once and usable everywhere. (Some templates should be converted to extensions, but it's far from feasible to do it with all templates.)
One crucial thing that makes templates (and gadgets) relevant to any major redesign project is that the designers and the developers who will work on it should themselves be accustomed to seeing them in the content or next to it, or at least to have a way to experience them easily in a language they know. This is possible to do in a scalable way only if they are global. (Some people assume that all templates are available in English, but it's very, very far from being true. The innovation in templates in Russian, French, Hebrew, Persian, and many other languages is amazing and mostly unknown to English-only Wikipedians. But that's a topic for a different thread. Maybe I'll start a series of blog posts titled "non-English Wikipedia template of the week"?)
Gadgets/scripts sometimes work as expected across different skins, and
sometimes not. That's a very different and distinct problem from templates.
Indeed. It's tempting to think that global templates and global gadgets are the same project, but they aren't.
I focus my efforts on promoting the idea of the necessity of global templates and modules, which are also distinct from each other, but much more closely related. Gadgets should be global, too, however.