Global templates/Status

November 2019

 * The topic was discussed at the Wikimedia Tech Conf 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia as a part of Developer Productivity & onwiki tooling. Global templates was recommended by the participants as one of the leading solutions to the current issues with templates.
 * There was a good discussion about how this huge task could be divided into smaller and more manageable tasks that could be implemented independently.
 * It looks like there is consensus that the first thing to make global is modules, and once they become stable, templates can be considered.
 * Amir cleaned up the subtasks and parent tasks of . See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T121470#5661933
 * The proposal pages are no longer marked as "draft". It is still not an official project, but there isn't much more to write.

October 2019

 * Added the pages Global templates/Relationship to strategy and Global templates/Alternative solutions as preparation for the Tech Conference.
 * Amir E. Aharoni published Short draft spec and Long draft spec as wiki pages.
 * Mostly full translations are available into Italian and Hebrew. Partial translations are available in German, Russian, and French. Enormous thanks to the translators!
 * The topic will be discussed at the Wikimedia Tech Conf 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia as a part of Developer Productivity & onwiki tooling.

Related notable past milestones

 * April 2019: The Multilingual Templates and Modules is started by Yurik to implement at partial support for templates and modules using bots
 * October 2018, Tech Conf 2018: "Producing + prioritizing Global templates" was listed as an action item for Core Platform.
 * September 2018: "A cross-project service to share templates" listed as one of the goals of Platform Evolution project.
 * February 2017: A similar proposal called meta:Global-Wiki, is closed as "There're consensus for this proposal" (sic). It has less technical details, but the general idea is similar.
 * December 2016: "Global gadgets" is voted #1 at the Community Wishlist Survey 2016. It's not about templates, but it's closely related.
 * December 2015: "Central global repository for templates, gadgets and Lua modules" is voted #3 at the Community Wishlist Survey 2015.
 * January 2006: Melancholie reports Bugzilla bug 4547: Support crosswiki template inclusion (transclusion => interwiki templates, etc.).
 * December 2004: The bug that asks for Interwiki templates is reported.