Wikimedia Northern Europe/Workspace/Model templates

Summary

The model templates, policy and help pages project aims to adress one of the major stumbling blocks for minority and indigenous language Wikipedias, particularly those that are currently inactive: A lack of "foundation" for the projects consisting of basic templates (such as info- and navboxes) with relevant documentation, policy pages explaining central principles and policies, and help pages explaining how to use the MediaWiki software. If a minority and indigenous language user visits their native language Wikipedia and is met with a poorly designed or nonexistent infrastructure (such as the Greenlandic Wikipedia), they will most likely be discouraged from contributing.

The goal of the project is to create simple, transposable templates, policy and help pages in english that can then be translated, either by the community or by professionals to the relevant minority or indigenous language to create a stable foundation for a natural editor base to develop.

Principles

The project is supposed to create a starting point for the projects. This means that policy pages should only contain the essence of the equivalent policies on other wikis, to allow for the local community to build on them, as well as avoiding cumbersome policies that the local communities might not have established otherwise or might choose to construct in a different way (such as arbitration committees or WikiProjects). This principle is less relevant for things like help pages or templates, but these should also be built "basics first", don't write about Semantic Wikipedia before explaining how to cite a source.
An effort should be made to avoid anglo- and euro-centric normativity. As an example, a minority or indigneous language community might have an unwritten and orally transfered history and thus a desire to use oral citations, something which isn't currently allowed on most Wikipedias. On the other hand, certain judgment calls have to be made, since the policies and help pages cannot be so vague that they're not helpful to new users.
These model templates and pages do not have to mimic the structures of existing language projects (as long as central principles like NPOV are respected). The English Wikipedia divides patrolling user rights and rollback rights up into two user groups, while the Danish Wikipedia has chosen to place them in a single user group. There is no reason that a minority language or indigenous language project should do one over the other, or not do something else entirely.

Pages and templates

Below is a list of model templates, policy and help pages. If you feel an essential page or template is missing from the list, feel free to add it, but remember principle 1.

Make all contributions subpages of this page, except for model templates which should be subpages of Template:Sandbox:MTP. Feel free to add a status indicator next to the link such as not started, work in progress, proofreading needed or similar.

If a list becomes unruly, feel free to arrange it into sublists such as source templates, user conduct policies or similar.

Model policy pages

"Policies" in this case also refers to what are referred to as "norms" on certain wikis like the English Wikipedia.

Model help pages

Model templates

Put a template and a module at the same bullet point if the module is the basis for the template. If a module is the basis for multiple templates, make a sublist of all the templates under the bullet point for the module.

Discussion

Please discuss all contributions on Talk:Wikimedia Northern Europe/Workspace/Model templates to avoid discussions being spread across sub-talk pages (feel free to make redirects to the main talk page from these).