Hi everyone,

In 2019, the German-speaking wikis selected “Make working with templates easier” as the focus area of Wikimedia Deutschland’s Technical Wishes project. Since then, our team has made improvements in different areas, to help template creators as well as users of the wikitext editor and VisualEditor. Our work on this focus area is coming to an end, so I’d like to summarize what happened and lay out the next steps:

Two changes from our Templates project have been available on all* wikis for a while already: 

• A new attribute “suggested values” was introduced to help you clarify what values a parameter may expect. [1]

• Line numbers are shown in the “Template” namespace when syntax highlighting (CodeMirror extension) is turned on. [2] A few wikis have these line numbers in _all_ namespaces. If you want this for your wiki as well, please reach out to us.

Several other changes were deployed to a small group in the past months. A big thanks to Catalan, Turkish, Greek, Malay, Twi, French, Hungarian, Hebrew, Finnish, Dagbani and German Wikipedia, to English Wikivoyage and Nauruan Wiktionary as well as Wikitech wiki for testing these changes and giving feedback to help us improve these projects. These changes are now coming to more wikis:

• Finding and inserting templates will become easier with an improved search (in the TemplateWizard & in the template dialog of VisualEditor and New Wikitext mode). [3]

• In VisualEditor, you’ll be able to remove a template from a page via the context menu, just like removing a table or an image. [4]

• In VisualEditor, the template dialog will become bigger and descriptions will be more visible. [5]

• When using syntax highlighting (CodeMirror extension)*, matching brackets will be highlighted [6] and the color scheme will be updated for better readability [7].

The planned deployment date for all of these changes is March 9 (and March 16 on English Wikipedia). 

A few weeks later, we’ll be deploying the last improvements from our Templates project:

• For syntax highlighting (CodeMirror extension), a colorblind-friendly color scheme will be added. You’ll be able to activate it via a user setting.

• A range of fundamental changes to the VisualEditor template dialog will be deployed. They will make it easier to understand what is expected from a template, to navigate the template dialog, and to add parameters to a template.

Feedback on all the projects is much appreciated on their respective talk pages. Thanks a lot on behalf of the Technical Wishes team,

Johanna, Community Communications Technical Wishes

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* All improvements in the CodeMirror extension, which provides syntax highlighting, only apply to wikis that have the extension installed. This is generally true for left-to-right language wikis, because unfortunately the extension doesn’t work sufficiently for right-to-left languages yet