Global templates/Status

November 2019

 * The topic was discussed at a workshop with Language team members and Catalan Wikipedians. Catalan Wikipedians showcased their project to make templates that are reusable in all languages and can be relatively robustly translated, as well as examples of templates that embed structured data uniformly using Wikidata properties and data files.
 * The proposal pages are no longer marked as "draft". It is still not an official project, but there isn't much more to write.
 * 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

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.