Movement Strategy initiative #16: Cross-Wiki Tools

Improve User Experience
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Cross-Wiki Tools

Wikimedia 2018-20 Recommendation 02 final.svg

Improving the User Experience of the Wikimedia platform involves making tools easier to use in all the different Wikimedia Projects. Currently, for example, many or most templates need to be manually copied from one Wikimedia Project to another. This means that the majority of templates are not available on smaller Wikis. One possible way to fix this is by creating global templates. Such templates and tools should also be easy to adapt in different languages, for example: to languages with right-to-left script. A part of this Initiative includes improving the documentation of the current tools to make it easier to adapt and reuse them.

Tools to connect cross-project and cross-language functionalities to provide an enhanced experience of the knowledge contained in the Wikimedia ecosystem for a particular interest, informational need, or inquiry.

  • Clear pathways for advancing new wiki proposals (including new language versions) and for reusing community-developed software features on them.
  • Developer tooling and high-quality documentation to allow technical contributors to create and maintain tools with usability and efficiency.

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Having a small group of popular templates would be so useful to many wikis. Every Wikipedia should have access to the common citation templates, {{citation needed}}, and a couple of Wikidata-aware infoboxes. Having one central copy would save so much volunteer time and energy.

That said, I hope it will be possible to say that this template is not used at certain wikis. The Wikivoyages have listing templates that they use heavily, but you would not want people to put those in Wikipedia articles. It would be good to say that the {{listing}} templates can’t be used at the Wikipedias, and {{cite book}} can’t be used at the Wikivoyages. (Wikivoyages don’t use that format.)

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This is what we were discussing about today on the call. @Jwale2 and @Yaw Tuba Hope a global template can be created for easier access to templates from other wikis

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