בתאריך יום ו׳, 13 בדצמ׳ 2019 ב-2:13 מאת Nick Wilson (Quiddity) <
nwilson@wikimedia.org>:
On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 5:26 PM Strainu
<strainu10(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The main problem I see with that is that is
changing all the on-wiki
templates and scripts that work with the current skin. There is also a
question of opportunity: with less and less desktop users, it just
makes more sense to invest in the mobile experience (and the beta mode
there is super cool, but still breaks some templates).
Templates that still have problems on mobile at some wikis, can usually be
fixed with the assistance of this page (especially section #12)
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Recommendations_for_mobile_friendly_articles…
-- I'll be sending a reminder to a few VillagePumps about this in the next
few weeks.
The instructions on this page are probably correct, but the practical
problem with this attitude is that to actually get it to work, it has to be
discovered, read, understood, and acted upon by people from 900 wikis, and
much less than half of these wikis have people who have the necessary
programming skills to do all of this. And, as you say, you need to say
reminders.
This is different from extensions, which are developed once and used
everywhere. The only thing that needs to be done to make them fully usable
is translating them, which is a reasonable thing to request. Some
extensions, such as Citoid and Wikilove, do need local adaptations to
actually be useful, but these are exceptions that prove the rule: it would
be better if these local adaptations weren't needed.
That's why templates need to be global, so that there will be a repository
of templates that are written once and usable everywhere. (Some templates
should be converted to extensions, but it's far from feasible to do it with
all templates.)
One crucial thing that makes templates (and gadgets) relevant to any major
redesign project is that the designers and the developers who will work on
it should themselves be accustomed to seeing them in the content or next to
it, or at least to have a way to experience them easily in a language they
know. This is possible to do in a scalable way only if they are global.
(Some people assume that all templates are available in English, but it's
very, very far from being true. The innovation in templates in Russian,
French, Hebrew, Persian, and many other languages is amazing and mostly
unknown to English-only Wikipedians. But that's a topic for a different
thread. Maybe I'll start a series of blog posts titled "non-English
Wikipedia template of the week"?)
Gadgets/scripts sometimes work as expected across different skins, and
sometimes not. That's a very different and
distinct problem from templates.
Indeed. It's tempting to think that global templates and global gadgets are
the same project, but they aren't.
I focus my efforts on promoting the idea of the necessity of global
templates and modules, which are also distinct from each other, but much
more closely related. Gadgets should be global, too, however.