Page values for "Submissions:2021/Global templates, and their special challenges for English, French, and Spanish languages"

The most important technical issue with the Wikimedia wikis is the lack of capability to share the code of templates and modules across wikis. They implement some of the most notable features of our sites, such as infoboxes, formatted references, hatnotes, "citation needed", sports results tables, and thousands of others, but unlike it is with MediaWiki extensions (and to a certain extent, gadgets), using them across different wikis and localizing them is extremely difficult. Despite being very important and affecting practically all Wikimedia wikis, this problem is frequently overlooked and ignored. However, it is a problem, and many editors have repeatedly asked to address it since 2004. There is a proposal to address it, called "Global templates". It has been supported by well over a hundred editors from many wikis, but three things are needed to implement it successfully:

• Unquestionable community consensus from many wikis, both larger and smaller.
• A commitment from MediaWiki engineering leadership to invest resources in developing the infrastructure for it.
• A plan, or at least a draft thereof, for using this infrastructure once it is deployed.

This topic was briefly presented at Wikimania 2021 under the title "Global templates, component templates", but this proposed presentation will be different in two important aspects: 1. It will be more detailed. 2. It will focus on the specific role of the communities of the English, French, and Spanish wikis in this process.

This presentation will:

• Show the problem.
• Show the proposed solution.
• Discuss the current status of development.
• Show the particular challenges that English, French, and Spanish wikis will have in the process.
• Give a stage for the communities of these wikis, and possibly others, to comment.

1. Please schedule this as early as possible in the day. I'm in the UTC+3 time zone. 2. Would be nice to get it interpreted into Spanish and French.

Yes. Wikimania 2021 and some other events. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Global_templates/Status . However, I never did this with focus on English, French, and Spanish wikis, and this is important.