Global templates/Proposed specification, short version/he

במיזמי ויקימדיה יש בעיה. התוכנה שהם רצים עליה מגיעה משני מקורות:


 * 1) תוכנת מדיה־ויקי והרחבות שלה, שמפותחות, מותקנות, ומתורגמות באופן מרוכז באמצעות Gerrit‏, translatewiki, וכלים קשורים אחרים.
 * 2) אוסף גדול של כלים שמפותח מקומית בכל אתר ויקי: תבנית, יחידות לואה, וגאדג׳טים.

עבור העורכים והקוראים של האתרים, הטכנולוגיות השונות מתערבבות יחד ונראות כמו מוצר אחד, אולם תהליכי פיתוח התוכנה השונים מציבים אתגרים:


 * Software features such as Visual Editor and Content Translation cannot be aware of such local customizations. For example, infoboxes are a notable feature of many wikis, but they are implemented separately in each of them, so Visual Editor cannot have an “Insert infobox” button, but only an “Insert template” button, and each editor has to know the the name of the template and type it.
 * Wikis with smaller communities are disadvantaged because they don’t have the expertise to develop templates and gadgets, and there is no way to port them easily. New wikis, in particular, start with a very barebones installation of MediaWiki and extensions, whereas a lot of functionality that is provided by templates and modules cannot be quickly installed and has to be imported manually.
 * Incompatibilities between deployed software and local customizations create bugs that are hard to anticipate and detect. Fixing them must be done on each wiki site separately. This can even lead to the rejection of some features by the community, leading to avoidable waste of development resources and friction between the WMF and the editors community.
 * The local customizations can often be useful in many different languages, but porting them between wikis and languages is extremely hard and time-consuming.
 * The differences between the local customizations make articles harder to translate. Resolving this problem can dramatically increase the speed in which content is translated and made accessible to larger parts of humanity.

Despite being very large, these problems are often overlooked. Software from the different groups is often blended seamlessly into the site’s user interface. People who primarily edit in one language or project may not realize that a certain feature is only available on that project, and think that it’s available everywhere. Even experienced software developers and managers in the WMF often make this mistake.

The proposed solution:


 * 1) Allow making some templates and modules global, similarly to images on Commons, global JS and CSS pages, global user pages, etc. (Gadgets should be global as well, but this is already possible in practice using hacks such as those used by HotCat. It’s not perfect, but it’s much less problematic than the issue with templates. Gadgets are therefore not in the scope of this proposal.)
 * 2) Each editing community must keep its autonomy to override the templates’ functionality and the information they present.
 * 3) The user interface strings of the global templates must be translatable in a translatewiki-like interface, similarly to extensions.
 * 4) The templates and modules will still be editable as wiki and immediately usable after publishing.
 * 5) Policies about maintenance, sharing, protection, and deletion of templates and modules will be developed by the editing community.

Making templates and modules global is challenging, however the core platform developers have said multiple times that it’s possible, and mostly requires product management and dedication. It has to be done, because the lack of global templates is the biggest usability challenge for all stakeholders: developers, new editors, veteran editors, and translators, in all languages and in all wiki projects.

A much more detailed proposal for how this will work is at User:Amire80/Global templates draft spec.