I don't see how "there are few other templates which could possibly benefit from this" - isn't that a major issue with license/warning/information templates and help pages? Indeed, this is a key complaint from third-party reusers. "Where are the welcome templates? Why isn't there any help documentation in the wiki?..." As well, for those working cross-wiki, learning the set of local templates is next to impossible - a standardized set of translated warnings and informational templates would be golden.
I can certainly list some templates that would be useful on every language of every project, starting with http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Xwiki-spam-warn and the other suggestions at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:External_links_policy
There is a fairly easy solution if we want to have a consistent set of babel templates across all wikis: Special:Export on the templates at meta, Special:Import on each wiki, and create the appropriate categories. Granted, there are >700 wikis, but this can be scripted. I would argue that babel templates, license templates, certain warning templates and a good set of help pages should all be translated and synced in this way.
As useful as it may seem, making /content/ (which is exactly what babel templates are) hardcoded is a sub-optimal solution for users, but if you're going to go this route, it is more useful to do so in a general way.
In the end, I see this as a solution looking for a problem. The real problem is not babel templates, but rather sharing these templates cross-wiki. If that's the case, then there are better solutions to the general problem, and we should pursue those. Mike
-----Original Message----- From: Andrew Whitworth [mailto:wknight8111@gmail.com] Sent: July 2, 2008 11:47 AM To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Implementing the Babel extension
The idea of having a generalized extension for sharing pre-made and pre-localized templates across projects is an interesting one. However, with the exception of these babel templates (and maybe copyright licensing templates), I can't imagine too many templates that are going to be useful across both projects and languages. A more general solution is only desirable if there is a more general class of problems to solve. The idea that it might be nice to be able to share more templates then just Babel is a good one, but the reality is that there are few other templates which could possibly benefit from this.
Gerard makes the good point that it's a lot of work to localize a template into 100+ languages, and there are few benefits for doing this to most templates.
--Andrew Whitworth.