tl;dr: We've been collectively whining about templates for long enough. Who wants to help with fixing them?
I want to help fix them.
I hope we can, for the coming period, accomplish the following:
- Catalog the problems with templates. Make a comprehensive list that
enumerates the problems with templates we have now, categories the problems (right now I'm roughly thinking in style, wikitext parsing rules and generated HTML, creation and writing issues (let's hope there is little of this one left after Scribunto), and usability by editors).
- Note which quirks that lead to technical difficulties are used in the
wild as features rather than bugs.
- Brain storm possible (partial) solutions.
- Find candidates that have high bang-for-buck possible solutions without
impeding future improvements much.
- Refine those solutions so we know quite exactly what it will fix, what it
won't fix, and what it would possibly break.
- Define sane fallback procedures for when things break; this should mainly
come from the editing communities, but could probably use some guidance of what is possible/easy/logical/feasible from a technical POV from the development community.
- Fix templates.
I'd like to add distribution as one of the pain points. I wanted to have the templates that are available on enwiki for another Mediawiki installation, but I couldn't get them to work. It seems like every template has a maze of dependencies, and when I resorted to exporting all of the templates from the Mediawiki site, the software consistently crashed before all templates were exported. I might have been doing it wrong, but I couldn't find any other options. Ideally, something like a package management system for templates, extensions, and skins would be a godsend.
What do you all think? Should we make this happen?
I'm no template expert, but I agree with a lot of what you've said based on the experiences I've had. I think we should discuss this somewhere that is less transient than this list. ln short, I'm down.
,Wil