(English) This is an essay. It expresses the opinions and ideas of some Wikimedians but may not have wide support. This is not policy on Meta, but it may be a policy or guideline on other Wikimedia projects. Feel free to update this page as needed, or use the discussion page to propose major changes.
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Let's fix templates!

Stuff (some) people dislike about templates edit

  • Template syntax is terrible. Mitigation effort in Scribunto. Can we clean up template syntax? Deprecate some parser functions?
  • Templates are hard to style. Mitigation effort started and abandoned in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Allow_styling_in_templates
  • Templates are used for metadata, where other solutions could be better. Examples are
    • Media Viewer
      Of what is Media Viewer an example?
      • Of problems that arise when templates are used to codify metadata. MV fails to display proper licencing and attribution at times when intricate templates are used to supply them.
    • ...
  • Templates make pages more difficult to parse in some cases. Parsoid has problems with that
  • Templates are intricately interconnected, and difficult to selectively export. Having a MediaWiki "basic template pack" could be nice
  • There is no interwiki template repository (GlobalTemplates, and Requests for comment/Global bits and pieces, and bugzilla:4547)
  • There is no interwiki scribunto repository (bug 39610[1] (links from mw m w))
  • Some template functions seem terribly convoluted, and could be discussed to be deprecated
    • unsubst
    • ...
  • ...

Stuff (some) people love about templates edit

  • Templates make it easy to insert a uniformly layed out element like an infobox in to many pages
  • They're just wikitext - which can make them simple and transparent: everyone who understands wikitext understands template syntax.

Examples of templates people like to use edit

Examples of templates people don't like to use edit