> 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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
