Topic on Lankide eztabaida:Theklan

Kaixo @Theklan! (Sorry, the rest of this message is in English). As part of a Starter kit project for smaller wikis, there is a work-in-progress guide around Templates & Modules here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Small_wiki_toolkits/Starter_kit/Templates_and_Modules.

I am reaching out to you with a few questions as I recently learned from a colleague you are an expert in this area :-)

• I would love to know your suggestions on the Templates currently on the list, which should not be there, and those that are not there and should be there.
• Is there anything like a note or reminder related to these templates that you would like to add in the "Template description" column?
• What do you think about the overall document? Is it making sense from a small wiki contributor perspective?

Looking forward to your input!

Thanks for contacting me Ssethi!

Ok... let's first decide what a "small wiki" means. Is it small because of it's number of articles? Because of it's number of contributors? Does it have someone (one!) who knows how to make templates, make batch editions or code in Lua?

We are a medium size Wikipedia (31st!) and we have a good amount of contributors. Some of us know how to build templates, and a couple of us know how to call things from Wikidata. No one knows Lua and we have to rely on other ocntributors in other languages for this.

I have been today working on our own Wikibooks, because we want to start a travel-guide like project there. We use automated templates here, something ALL Wikipedias should have. Period. I started by copying Module:Wikidata to have automated templates ready. Ok. Then infobox template. Oh... Module:Infobox is missing! Ok... oh.. Module:Math, Module:String are missing. And their submodules. Module:Convert. Module:Coord. Template:Coord. Template:Convert... Module:Wikibase (!!!) was missing. CSS and JS... I can't edit them (we don't have an interface editor there) so I found a trick that most editors won't know. Module:Arguments (I don't know what is for, but it seems important). Module:Map... because we want a map. (You can see my edits only for modules here).

When we started deploying Module:Wikidata in order to have automated templates in some small languages, they wanted this three things:

• Biography (not the infobox person, not: a fully automated one)
• City/Province (geographical items)
• Building

You can automate nearly everything, but this three should be something that comes with a small Wikipedia. And all their subdependencies. It should be global (@Amire80), not locally mantained (who is going to mantain it?) and should look great from the very first edition we make.

Please, don't look to the English Wikipedia. They have thousands of editors and they can spent a lot of time in virtually anything. Small Wikipedias only want to write, not to find someone who can figure out how to get things done.

Thanks!

Kaixo @Theklan! Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and apologies for my late response!

So, first, by small wikis, we refer to the ones listed here https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Small_and_large_wikis#Small_wikis.

I completely understand the pain points you have described around importing a module from one wiki to another (saw your edits around Module:Wikidata!). The starter kit's idea is only to help small wikis get started by providing a list of resources, tools, and recommendations in technical areas. I am aware that the tools that can make some of the processes, such as the one you have mentioned around automating the import of templates/modules easy, are much needed. Unfortunately, developing the tool is currently not in the scope of the work of the Starter kit project or my team.

I agree with your point about the guide around templates and modules currently being English Wikipedia centric. I have started to look into this more; for example, for Wikidata-powered infoboxes, we now link the ones on Catalan wiki. If you know a template on the page I linked, which is easier to use than the English version, feel free to edit the page or let me know here directly. Thanks!

हैलो! Srishti! Ok, I'll have a look, but most technical templates, except that specific catalan module, usually are better mantained at enwiki. From my own experience, coordinate templates and map templates are difficult to have if you don't know how, and all Wikipedias want that. I figure out that automatic citation tools from Citoid should be included, and well documented, but this is not only a template, it includes json and other exotic things.

Have a good day!