Global templates

Many of the most notable features of Wikimedia sites are implemented as templates and Scribunto Lua modules: Wikipedia Infoboxes and citations, maps, navigation headers on Wikisource and Wikibooks, conjugation tables in Wiktionary, deletion and merging procedures in multiple wikis, and hundreds of others.

Even though many of these features are very prominent, there is a significant hurdle to their development: On Wikimedia projects they are stored separately on each wiki. While it allows the local community of editors on each wiki a lot of freedom to innovate and develop the templates that it needs, it makes it very inconvenient to collaborate on the development of templates that could be shared across wikis, and to translate them.

Over the years there have been several proposals to make templates shared across wikis. Editors have requested this since 2004. On the technical side, there were Scary Transcluding, Shadow namespaces, and Multilingual Templates and Modules. It was also included, without a specific timeline, as one of the goals of Platform Evolution project. On the community side, the topic came up multiple times in the Community Wishlist Surveys, and received a lot of votes. Despite many discussions, these proposals were never fully implemented.

The problem remains, however, and needs to be resolved, but such a project requires wide organizational and community commitment. This page is an attempt to build such commitment.

'''This is not a project that is being executed or planned to be executed by anyone at any defined point in time, at least not yet. This is just an idea, albeit a very detailed one.'''

In the wiki spirit of "no ownership", these pages belong to the community. Feel free to comment, edit, improve, discuss, express objections, etc. The more it is owned by the community, the better it will all be.


 * Proposed product specification, short version
 * Proposed product specification, long version
 * Discussion about this project - Support / Oppose / Express your opinion
 * Alternative solutions - how does this proposal relate to other similar proposals
 * Relationship to strategy - how does this proposal relate to other long-term plans proposed by the WMF and WM-DE
 * The status of this project

Other proposals of this kind

 * Wikilambda - A bigger proposal, which includes a global module and template repository
 * Template repository
 * Multilingual Templates and Modules
 * Multilingual MediaWiki
 * Requests for comment/Global bits and pieces
 * Global-Wiki

Related technologies

 * Help:TemplateData
 * Extension:Translate

Ongoing globalization

 * Commons:
 * Templates: translation possible and Convert to international. Used to tag images using inside descriptions or captions in a specific script or language that should be converted to a language neutral form. This would allow globalization (its use in all Wikimedia projects and all Wikimedia languages). You can see usage cases in File:Biological classification L Pengo vflip.svg description, where you can Render the same image in different languages.
 * Help:Autotranslate. This template is used as a part of the larger mechanism to show a template content in the user's interface language.