On Oct 9, 2014 8:08 AM, "MZMcBride" z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Helder wrote:
This is why we have proposals like https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GlobalTemplates https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global-Wiki
Yes, a million times this. We must figure out a way to centralize templates so that maintenance is easier. The current system of per-project wiki templates really strains under scale as many wikis have few active editors and most of them are not technical.
Regarding inline styling specifically, I feel like we had this exact conversation a year ago on Bugzilla or wikitech-l. As I recall, the gist of the previous discussion was that we need to better educate users about what good practice is, perhaps provide testing better tools (make it easier to see how it looks on mobile, as Brion suggests), and then slowly try to deprecate inline styling over the next few years.
I'm curious to see where the "Allow styling in templates" request for comments goes (cf. https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?curid=130320), particularly with regard to the goal of atomizing content, which I think the Parsoid and VisualEditor (Editing!) teams seem to want. While I probably generally agree with trying to kill inline styling, it does have seem to have a convenient advantage of being more easily encapsulated.
Related: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35704
MZMcBride
If everything here comes together, centralizing templates may be not such a hot idea. The reason being, if we externalise style as the rfc proposes, and externalize logic in Lua modules, a large part of what is left is localization, which logically belongs on the local wiki - if we find a good way to centralize style and modules obviously.
I realize that it's not everything that's left, there is also the markup structure obviously, which is often a large part of a template, or sometimes even all of the template, and splitting style off to a central wiki while keeping the templates to which the style applies local seems off as well. It is something to maybe keep in mind though, and give some further thought.
I'd like to note that I'm really happy with this thread by the way. Jon fixing the mess we leave behind on our on wiki template work obviously doesn't scale. But Jon and others in development taking the lead through some edits, so people become more aware of that mobile is, actually, a thing, and how to deal with that with regard to styling could work.
--Martijn.
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