Yes, and that's why I really, really, really want to hear more feedback on it from various communities of editors, including criticism. That's also why in my proposal I write that it's a requirement that communities must be able to override any central functionality, and I only speak about the generic principle of making templates global, mentioning particular templates only as examples. I leave everything else to the communities.
The parts about which I wrote that they will have to be done mostly by staff are the parts that require heavy PHP coding, code review, and testing, and as far as I know, most of the people who know the relevant areas of code well are on staff. (I might be wrong. Also, everything I'm saying here are my own assessments, and they don't represent the WMF in any way.)
However, the more volunteer developers and editors participate in it, the better—not because it saves money, but because it makes the project more "owned" by the community.
בתאריך שבת, 14 בדצמ׳ 2019, 09:12, מאת John Erling Blad jeblad@gmail.com:
I get a little scared when I read “probably, but not necessarily, mostly by staff” because all kind of central standardization creates a whole lot of arguing in the individual subprojects. If that standardization means changing a whole lot of templates I'm afraid it will create much more fighting than real solutions. I'm a little “Marvin” here…
On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 10:14 AM Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
בתאריך יום ה׳, 12 בדצמ׳ 2019 ב-23:37 מאת Pine W <
wiki.pine@gmail.com
>:
I'm thinking out loud here. Are there any estimates of would be
required in
terms of time (both staff time and community time) and money to make templates and other tools be much easier to globalize across wikis and across skins? I'm looking for an answer that is more specific than "a
lot",
but isn't a promise or a detailed estimate.
Difficult to say.
I won't make an actual time estimation, because I'm very bad at doing it, and because I have too many conflicts of interest ;)
However, I do hope to give you something more specific than "a lot". I envision the following feasible plan for "global modules and templates, phase 1":
- Make a localization framework for modules. (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238417 ; probably, but not
necessarily,
mostly by staff)
- Develop a documentation page and a framework for making robust modules
(
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238532 ; probably, but not
necessarily,
mostly by staff).
- Make modules storable and loadable from a global repository, and
*actually enable it on all Wikimedia projects* ( https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T41610 ; probably, but not
necessarily,
mostly by staff).
- Migrate most local modules from all the wikis to using global modules,
and deleting all the migrated local modules. This will have to be done by the editors communities in many wikis, and it will only be feasible if
all
the points above are planned and executed well. The challenges I expect
at
this step are: ** Making sure that just the right amount of things are global and everything that communities want to override locally can be conveniently overridden. ** Making tough choices about which modules to use when several
communities
developed modules with similar functionality. For example: English,
French,
Russian, Spanish, and Hebrew Wikipedias have modules for loading Wikidata values. They aren't the same, but they probably should be. Merging them into a global module will require a lot of good-faith collaboration.
Note that I only mentioned modules. Templates have some extra challenges. But once modules are done well, a "phase 2" of this project, that would tackle templates, will become possible. Also, global gadgets will have to be a separate project. Maybe the same localization framework can be used for both modules and gadgets, but I cannot think of anything else that
they
really have in common.
All of the above is my interpretation of discussions in the recent Tech Conf in Atlanta (other people may have a significantly different interpretation). See these Phab tasks, and the web of other tasks linked
to
them: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T234661 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T52329 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
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