// sorry for cross-posting

Hello!

Several improvements are planned for this year to make working with templates easier. [1] All of them are part of the Technical Wishes project at Wikimedia Germany [2]. After a lot of research, feedback on- and off-wiki as well as testing [3], the following projects were chosen to solve different problems that people on the wikis encounter when they work with templates:

For template users:

• The VisualEditor template dialog will be improved significantly. This will be a bigger series of changes to help users make small edits without accidentally breaking the template or page, and without needing to fully understand the complexities of templates. This will include, among other things, making descriptions and examples more visible, added links to documentation, an easier way to insert files into a template, and a sidebar which always shows the parameters a template can have. Also, some advanced functionality will be hidden when they are not relevant.   

• It will become easier to find and to insert templates on a page, both in the VisualEditor/Wikitext Editor 2017 and the TemplateWizard (WikiEditor 2010).

• A small but helpful change will be that removing a template from a page will become much easier when you’re using the VisualEditor.

For template creators and maintainers:

• The TemplateData editor will be improved. TemplateData offers guidance to VisualEditor users, and helps reduce errors and cleanup work, but many templates don’t make full use of TemplateData yet. The work on this editor will include several changes to make adding and changing TemplateData easier.

• A new parameter property ‘suggestedvalues’ will be introduced. This can be used to create a list of values which VisualEditor users will be able to select from a dropdown. This can also help reduce errors and create more consistency in how the template fields are filled. 

• Matching brackets will be highlighted inside the existing syntax highlighting feature. This will make working with complex template syntax easier and is already active on a few wikis.

• The color scheme for syntax highlighting will be improved, making code easier to read, especially for contributors with low vision.

• Finally, in syntax highlighting, line numbers will be added to be able to detect line breaks at a glance. A side effect of this feature could be that it will become easier to refer to a particular line in discussions. Hence, the impact of this feature might be well beyond templates.

More information on the projects can be found on their project pages, which are linked in this overview: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Templates

We plan to deploy these changes in batches, and the process will differ depending on the feature: By June 2021, one change after the other will be deployed to a set of initial wikis – some smaller changes will however be deployed to all wikis right away. If your wiki wants to get all the changes as soon as they are available, let me know. In any case, deployment of all changes to all wikis is planned for later this year.

After bracket matching, which is already active on some wikis, we plan to deploy the improved color scheme for syntax highlighting, the new parameter property ‘suggestedvalues’ and line numbering next.

A big thanks to everyone who contributed to the Templates project so far, by testing, providing feedback or else. Comments and questions are welcome on the project's talk page. [4]

For the Technical Wishes team,

Johanna