[Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Implementing the Babel extension

[Marcus Buck]

The whole discussion about Babel templates or even other templates 
includable through an extension essentially is about "shared content". 
Shared content that should be the same on every wiki but is separately 
and redundantly stored on every single wiki. That's comparable to 
images, which where stored separately on every single wiki until the 
creation of Commons. Or comparable to interwikies, which are stored 
separately on every wiki until today (although recently there were an 
solution proposed for this, see 
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_newer_look_at_the_interwiki_link>).

How about creating a wiki from which every Wikimedia project can include 
any pages. Like templates or interwiki tables or pages like info on 
legal contact addresses or the designted agent or help pages which could 
be useful to several projects (for example 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Template> which is synchronized with 
the master help page at Meta by bot).

This feature is already implemented in MediaWiki: 
$wgEnableScaryTranscluding 
(<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgEnableScaryTranscluding>).

Well, the name makes it clear: This pre-existing functionality in its 
current technical design is "scary", but we could easily adjust the 
existing solutions 
(<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Interlanguage>, 
<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Babel>) to create a less 
"scary" technical solution to include all kinds of content from an 
central repository.

Marcus Buck