Community Wishlist/Focus areas/Template recall and discovery
Description
We're building a better way for new and experienced contributors to recall and discover templates via the template dialog, to increase dialog usage and the number of templates added.
Via the template dialog, it is hard for contributors find and insert templates.
We've bucketed this work into "template discovery", helping newcomers learn how to use templates and find a template, and "template recall," helping experienced editors find and insert templates they've successfully used.
At this stage, we are focused on template recall first, and template discovery second.
Since 2013, experienced volunteers have asked for a more intuitive template selector, exposing popular or most-used templates on the templates dialog.
This ties into our PES 1.3.2 OKR: By building an improved template discovery, we will have addressed 3+ wishes that constitute a “Focus area,” and will have a Proof of Concept to share with the Foundation for annual planning.
Today’s User experience:
When an editor clicks on “templates” from either Wikitext or Visual Editor, the template selector is empty. This design is not very helpful for newcomers who seek to add a template, or for experienced editors who must type in a template name.
One volunteer said:
As a beginner, one may spend half an hour finding the appropriate template – and if it doesn’t have an easy-to-remember name (what is easy-to-remember is subjective, so it may not be possible to find a name that’s easy to remember for everyone), one needs to spend this half hour the second, third and fifteenth time as well. [favoriting templates] doesn't solve the problem of the first half-hour search, but it does solve the ones of the subsequent ones
Scope and investigations
Because we want to ship iteratively, we are limiting the scope of this focus area. For example, we will not consider global templates and instead opt for incremental improvements to the template selection experience.
There are over 600k templates on English Wikipedia, and many wikis have over 30k templates. Helping someone find the right template is a challenge.
We think the following recall or discovery tactics might be useful and actionable, and are under consideration:
- Suggest templates that are most popular/transcluded in your wiki (ideally namespace)
- Show templates you’ve recently used
- Allow users to “favorite” or bookmark templates
- Highlight templates with descriptions and good documentation
- Improve search
We think the following methods of template recall or discovery could be fraught with challenges and are less actionable in the early stages.
- Filter templates by categories. There are over 33k template categories on EN wiki, and 120+ categories of “Element isotopes.” Even for the experienced editor, it’s cumbersome to search.
- Popular templates across wikis. Not every wiki has the same instantiation of “Infobox,” or “Sfn.” It will be hard to scale.
- Allow editors of a local wiki to recommend templates. While this aligns to wiki principles, given the breadth of templates and template categories, it would be cumbersome to build a "template recommendation configuration" experience that scales to all wikis. At this stage, we are seeking lower-effort initiatives.
Community engagement
Since this focus area was created off the 2023 wishlist and was identified before our 2024 rollout, the wishes have already been voted for, and so we are aware the issues raised are important to the community. You can vote for the focus area and also leave feedback to help give an indication if we are moving in the right direction.
We are currently in the design phase of this work, and will share updates on this page. Feedback is certainly requested and welcomed!
Design explorations
Following screen mockups show how templates can be favourited and retrieved as per user's requirement. These are initial explorations and we would welcome any feedback.
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1. Favourite templates -
2. Favouriting a template from search result -
3. Recently searched templates -
4. Recently used templates and the articles where they have been used
Other details
Last updated: 11:03, 14 September 2024 (UTC)
Created: 21:02, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
Wishes in this focus area
Below is a list of wishes that have informed this focus area. More wishes may be added to this table over time. Voting for the focus area is not a guarantee that each wish will be explicitly delivered; rather, the wishes are suggestive of the problem at large. Once a focus area is adopted, the respective team will work alongside communities to prioritize and deliver on the most impactful solutions.
| Wish | Phabricator tasks | Type | Projects | Date (UTC) | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Select templates by categories | T55590 | Feature request | All projects | September 5, 2024 | Open |
| Easy access Templates | Feature request | All projects | September 4, 2024 | Open | |
| Quickly Add Infobox | T55590 | Feature request | All projects | September 4, 2024 | Open |
| Quickly add favorite and related templates | T347370, T55590 | Feature request | All projects | September 4, 2024 | Open |
Teams and affiliates
Community members
Voting
This area currently has 25 supporters. Voting for this area is open until it is completed. Show your support using the button below.
Supporters of this area
Support Shushugah (talk) 12:16, 10 September 2024 (UTC) Templates are one of the most challenging areas for our editors to access and edit. Support all improvements here, and even as an advanced editor I frequently have to search documentation, or even the name of a template Support Escargot bleu (talk) 10:46, 14 September 2024 (UTC) I think allowing communities to define a list of most useful templates would be better than automatically generating a list of most-used templates.