Global templates/Relationship to strategy

The Global templates proposal is in harmony with many of the strategic directions as published by the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Germany in several documents. This page intends to show how.

Wikimedia Foundation Medium-term plan 2019
The Wikimedia Foundation Medium-term plan 2019 has several priorities and goals. Here is how the Global templates proposal related to many of them:

Brand awareness
While the Brand awareness goal doesn't seem to be directly related to the Global templates proposal, which is a technical project, they are in fact related.

Some of Wikimedia sites' most notable features, such as Infoboxes, footnotes, and "citation needed", are implemented using templates. They are as much a part of the Wikipedia brand as the puzzle globe logo. Having them implemented in a modern, consistent, robust, and multilingual way will make the brand more stable and internationalized.

Worldwide readership
Make incremental but meaningful changes to our core products: The templates are part of the core product, for any definition of "core product". If MediaWiki is the core product, templates are one of its key features. If Wikipedia, Commons, Wikidata, Wikisource, other wikis, and their reading and editing experiences, are the core product, then templates are used in them ubiquitously, and should be treated at the highest level.

Substantially extend our core product experiences: This priority is about integrating content from Commons, Wikidata, Wikisource and other projects into Wikipedia, and about structured data. Implementing global templates will go a long way to make content propagation between different and wikis easier, and will empower all editor communities to innovate in it.

Change the paradigm of free knowledge: Global templates doesn't break how Wikipedia works, but it allows the communities to work more efficiently on developing innovative features. It's the same community that created the prose and the templates, and made Wikipedia so successful in the first place. Reusing its current skill-set and making it easier for people to collaborate more easily will bring even greater innovation and new paradigms of free knowledge.

Thriving movement
We will welcome and support newcomers: Global templates will make templates easier to use for newcomers in both small and large wikis. In particular, it takes into account not just newcomers in the sense of "new editors in an existing wiki", but also editors in completely new wikis who hadn't edited in any other wiki, for example editors of wikis in new languages.

We will have strong, diverse, and innovative communities that represent the world: Making templates global will make communities stronger and more diverse by allowing them to collaborate. It will make the communities more innovative by allowing technical innovation from any wiki to be easily used on all other wikis. This is a particularly important point, because technical innovation in templates and modules on medium-sized wikis is frequently overlooked.

We will have strategic partnerships and coalitions with aligned organizations / We will have strong and empowered movement leaders and affiliates: Making templates global will address this issue, too, even though it make seem non-obvious. One example is that many chapters said that they are reluctant about teaching people to use Content Translation more widely because it's not stable enough with infobox and reference templates. Global templates will fully address this problem.

Platform evolution
Software platforms with integrated machine learning, rich media, and structured data components, and associated tooling for internal and external development and reuse of code and content: Global templates will help make all templates semantic and easier to process for machine learning algorithms. It will make rich media and structured data components easier to reuse across projects. And of course, reuse of code and content is what the whole Global templates is all about.

Fully automated and continuous code health and deployment infrastructure: Templates and modules (and also gadgets) currently don't go through any consistent code health or deployment infrastructure. Some templates and modules have test suites, but there is no consistent framework for this, and developing such a consistent framework won't be scalable without storing the templates in a central place. And templates and modules do need a code health and deployment infrastructure, because, just like core MediaWiki and extensions, they implement important and notable features, and they are code.

Tooling for contributors is easy to use, well-documented, and accessible to users, increasing engagement and contribution: This, again, is a central point of the whole Global templates proposal: making (onwiki) tools easy to use and accessible for contributors. The proposal even addresses documentation.

One of the metrics for the Platform evolution priority is: "25% of content consumed or created uses structured data. This includes Wikidata but also extends to content from articles, templates, and other sources stored in formats that can be used programmatically for various contribution and consumption formats." If templates become global, then it's likely that much more than 25% of them will be using structured data. In any case, measuring this will be far easier on one central wiki repository than on 900 wikis.

Platform Evolution 2018 project
The Platform Evolution project (2018) indicated some intentions to have support for global templates in the future. The page Platform Evolution/Recommendations discusses ideas for updating content modularity, and says:


 * Create a service for rendering components from template content
 * Templates in the MediaWiki ecosystem are overloaded with different use cases: they provide content structure, reusable components, and allow contributors to modify the display of content with custom logic. This recommendation has strong potential for creating modularization that benefits the system as a whole. It is tricky to discuss though, because "templates" mean different things to different people and have different use cases. In this case, we don't mean Mustache templates that govern look and feel. We mean encapsulating the "boxes" of content that are added to pages. These may (or may not) take parameters defining some of their content. A first step for the Working Group will be to define what is included in this "template" modularization effort and what isn't.
 * These “boxes” are an ideal focus area for creating modularity. They represent self contained features and also an opportunity to enable equitable sharing of user features across projects and languages be establishing a cross-project service to share templates. This project will also force us to consider how to handle content layout and structure separately from composable pieces content.

The closely related page Platform Evolution/Goals lists this as one of the goals:


 * Increase equity and power of contribution tools. We want to support the contribution of more content types of content, including media, in more interactive ways and across all projects. This means making some existing tools - like templates - available for consistent reuse across all projects and languages. It also means improving translation tools to remove silos of content. Finally, we also want to make it easy for contributors to create new cross-project, localizable content tools.

Wikidata
The Global templates proposal also corresponds to some key points in the Wikidata strategy documents, which were published in August 2019.

In particular, the Vision document list the following two things as roadblocks to better development of Wikidata:


 * Acceptance inside the Wikimedia projects: Right now the movement consists of multiple, very separated projects. This leads to fractured communities. To truly fulfill its potential, Wikidata requires these separate projects to work together to some extent. This causes friction that needs to be addressed.
 * Data access usability: Getting data out of and truly benefiting from Wikidata still requires a lot of effort and technical knowledge. For example, building an infobox powered by Wikidata requires skills in template and Lua programming that especially smaller projects often lack.

The Global templates proposal address both of these issues. Creating a central repository will make the projects less separated and the communities — less fractured. A central repository will make working together easier.

Data access usability will also be addressed. Information is brought in from Wikidata into Wikipedia, Commons, and other projects using templates and modules, and collaborating on developing these modules will make this easier for all projects. And smaller projects will get immediate access to all the necessary templates and Lua modules even if they don't have people who have the necessary skills.

In addition, the Strategy for Wikidata for Wikimedia projects document lists the following things as Guiding principles:


 * We do not force any project to adopt Wikidata’s data. Integration with Wikidata is only sustainable if it is driven by the communities.
 * Each project is unique in what benefits and drawbacks Wikidata adoption has for them. It’s ok to have different adoption rates and focuses based on each project’s maturity andneeds.


 * Sometimes local overwrites and exceptions to Wikidata’s data are necessary. That’s ok but we strive for sharing as much data as possible to the benefit of everyone while allowing local autonomy where needed.

The Global templates is in full harmony with these principles. It says: "Sometimes some communities will have strong opinions about wanting to have particular functionality or design that will be different in their language or project, or to show an infobox with information that is different from what is shown in other projects, or not to show it at all. The capability to override things locally must be allowed from the start."