WikidataCon 2021

Global templates: Towards a New Age of Cross-wiki Data Collaboration
2021-10-30 , Room 2

Templates and modules are the most important tool that the community of editors on all wikis have to enhance the wiki pages with efficient, uniform, structured and nicely-presented data. They are enormously versatile, and they are used on nearly every wiki page, but because their code is stored on every wiki separately, this makes collaboration across wikis and sharing of content and structured harder than it should be. Since 2004, there were several proposals to allow cross-wiki transclusion or a "global templates repository", and this finally seems to be gaining wide support from the editors community and the leadership. However, once the infrastructure is in place, how will the wikis actually collaborate with each other on developing templates? This panel will present the problem, and attempt to brainstorm on this, with a famous example relevant to Wikidata: the auto-filled Infobox. Several wikis developed Wikidata-driven infoboxes with similar functionality, but different internal implementation. Will they be able to merge at least some of the code and improve the collaboration and the sharing? We'll try to answer.


Link to notes:

https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WikidataCon2021-Sisterprojects-Globaltemplates

What will the participants take away from this session?:

Understanding of the current problems that the lack of global templates create. Understanding of the proposed solution to the problem. Understanding of different perspectives and functionalities of Wikidata-driven infoboxes in different languages, and ways to improve the cross-wiki and cross-language collaboration on this topic.

Language:

English

Recording:

Yes

Other links:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Global_templates

Presentation at Wikimania: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5BRvww_tj0&t=21m50s