Global templates

Many of the most notable features of Wikimedia sites are implemented as templates and 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 editors community on each wiki a lot of freedom to innovate and develop the templates that it needs, it makes it very inconvenient to share 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. 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, none of these proposals were 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.


 * Draft product specification, short version
 * Draft product specification, long version
 * Alternative solutions
 * Support / Oppose / Express your opinion: Discussion about this project
 * 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