Bumping a great thread: Is this the right page?
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fixing_templates
On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 5:45 AM, Martijn Hoekstra martijnhoekstra@gmail.com wrote:
I'm thinking a page on Meta to start with. I'll get round to it when I get home from work tonight CET.
On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 11:33 AM, Wil Sinclair wllm@wllm.com wrote:
Exsqueeze the ignorance. I'm still a n00b. Martijn, where should we set this discussion up?
It's clear that there are several people who are interested in talking templates. I'm getting my hands dirty with them on another project I'm working on. I don't mean to rush you; just tell me what to set up for this discussion and where, and I'll make sure it gets done.
,Wil
On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 1:48 AM, Martijn Hoekstra martijnhoekstra@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 10:04 AM, Wil Sinclair wllm@wllm.com wrote:
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.
Great to hear. Getting my ass in to gear is one of my greatest
weaknesses,
and from what I know from you you're really good at that. :)
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.
A "Mediawiki core templates pack" sounds like a good idea - as would
making
template and module interdependencies explicit to somewhat avoid the
Great
Tangle.
aside - wikitech-l as well as #mediawiki freenode are in my experience happy to help with individual setup woes, which could help you with the acute import issues /aside
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.
Stop rushing me all y'all! ;)
ln short, I'm down.
,Wil
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