Translations:Global templates/Relationship to strategy/38/en

The skills for developing templates and modules are non-trivial. Both templates and modules have a lot of obscure features. Even though many of the sites’ most notable features are implemented as templates and modules, these skills are often underappreciated and taken for granted. There are dozens of people who have these skills, and they edit many different wikis. They usually focus on their home wiki and relatively rarely communicate with people from other wikis or other languages. Even though the underlying technology is the same everywhere, there is no true global community of template developers that would be comparable to the global community of MediaWiki core and extensions developers. There are cases of cross-wiki collaboration on certain templates, but they are inconsistent. This situation is far from optimal. The template and module developers’ skills need more appreciation. They develop truly needed features, and they are embedded in their editors communities. In wikis in many languages, the template developers come up with innovative features for structured content, data presentation, and modularization. These innovations could be useful in many wikis, but currently there is no convenient mechanism to achieve this.