Meet the boilerplate makers
Can't work without 'em, if you're working on a wiki, but it seems that many Wikipedians can't work with 'em, either. Templates, of course – the backbone of every page providing layout, banners, infoboxes, and fancy links that change around when you refresh the page. Luckily, we have a team of editors super-versed in how to manipulate the markup to produce the final result that we want, providing a smooth and (hopefully) stylish appearance to the reader. WikiProject Templates, with a current membership of around 60, helps to do the following:
- Conducting efforts to better organise, document and display all templates in the template namespace, including: navigation templates, infobox templates, inline templates linking country articles, stub types, image copyright tags and user language templates (Babel).
- Solving specific templates issues, such as standardisation and locations.
- Improving the general documentation on how to create and use templates, in addition to improving the documentation pages of the individual templates.
- Clean-up of the unused, unneeded and/or redundant templates, using the templates for discussion (TfD) process and guidelines.
- Providing help and guidance in creating, updating, correcting and testing templates.
- Improving template accessibility
That's rather a big remit when all looked at together, so to give us more of an idea, we interviewed APerson, Paine Ellsworth and Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing).
What motivated you to join the project? Do you have a particular interest or proficiency in maintaining templates?
- Paine Ellsworth: Back when I joined, I was fascinated by the fact that even a small edit to a template has the power to affect every page to which it's transcluded, and I wanted to help manage the template namespace. I guess I've gained a little proficiency over the years, mostly just learning from other template editors.
- APerson: I always was very interested in templates, and especially liked some of the amazing things that could be accomplished via templates. For instance, according to some people, templates are (or were) Turing complete.
- Pigsonthewing: I first became interested in template development in 2007, when I realised they could be made to emit microformats (machine-readable metadata), making their content understandable to computers, as well as people. The work I did on that is one of the things that led to Wikidata. Learning to code templates for that purpose gave me a wider interest in their use, and especially their accessibility, since web accessibility is another interest of mine. I'm also active in having redundant templates deleted or merged; we have far too many with only minor variations, and that's both confusing for editors (and readers, when the templates' presentation varies arbitrarily in similar articles) and a cause of unnecessary extra work for those of us who maintain them.
Does WikiProject Templates collaborate with any other projects?
- Paine Ellsworth: There is a list of collaborations on the project page in the section "Related WikiProjects", and there are probably several more that are "unofficial" or "informal", such as WikiProject Redirects and WikiProject Disambiguation.
- Pigsonthewing: Informally: all of them. There isn't a single project that doesn't make use of templates, and thus benefit from our work. And of course we're always happy to hear from projects. (or editors) who have a template issue and need our help.
How would you rate this project's success and participation?
- Paine Ellsworth: Since templates are by their nature a delicate issue due to their potential to harm the overall Wikipedia project if misused, in my opinion my fellow project members, past and present, have done an admirable job of managing template namespace.
- Pigsonthewing: In the famous phrase, "it is too early to judge". There is still a lot to do, to make, improve, and deploy templates, and to improve their accessibility. But we've come a long, long way in that regard, too.
What are WikiProject Templates's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?
- Paine Ellsworth: There is a list of open tasks on the project page, and I would encourage new editors to read the project page, its talk page and other template-related project and help pages to learn as much as possible about template management. And then dig right in!
- Pigsonthewing: We need people – not just template editors, but also those who deploy them – to understand how accessibility issues affect templates; currently the hot issue is that many of them don't understand colour contrast requirements. We see people wanting to put, say, dark red text on dark green backgrounds, and a lot of people just can't read that. Some people can't read combinations that you or I might not find troublesome. All we need to do is to abide by the International Standard on web accessibility, but some resist that, often for weak reasons, or even no apparent reason at all.
Anything else you'd like to add?
- Paine Ellsworth: Just that working with other template editors on the project has been more than a rewarding experience, and I wish them and all the workers at The Signpost only the very best!
- Pigsonthewing: Populating templates with data from Wikidata is going to be a big game changer, and we're only just scratching the surface, there. And there's work to do to standardise templates (and the underlying Lua modules) across this Wikipedia, and to share them with other-language Wikipedias and sister projects, too. We need to combine the "TemplateData" required by the Visual Editor (VE) with ordinary template documentation, so we don't have to store (and update) everything twice. Finally, we need VE to work better with templates.
The WikiProject report will be taking a break for a couple of weeks while the regular author has a vacation. If you're interested in having a wikiproject that you work with featured in a future report, make sure to drop a note at the Signpost's WikiProject desk, and as always you may take a look in the archive to read previous reports.
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