Scope

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Initial mandate: "Create a bit of a taxonomy of the most commonly used templates: What are they for, do we currently provide a great experience editing them visually, and if not, can this be done on the basis of templates, or should we look at a different solution".

Classifications

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Purpose

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Questions:

  • What are templates used for?
  • What is a good use of a template? A poor use?

Leads:

Construction

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Questions:

  • What are the components and building blocks of templates?
  • How are templates built?
  • Who creates and edits templates?
  • What is a well-constructed template? What are poorly-constructed templates?

Leads:

  • Break down templates by whether:
    • they have parameters
      • they have a fixed or variable number of parameters
    • they use parser functions
      • including expensive parser functions
    • they use Lua
    • they add a category
    • they contain any CSS (do they have a style?)
    • they're self-contained (do they close all the tags they opened?)
  • Look into templates authors:
    • Look up contribution statistics in the template namespace
  • Look into protection levels for templates

Output & usage

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Questions:

  • What are the most widely used templates?
  • What are the templates used the most frequently? (cumulative usage in pages)
  • What does the crosswiki landscape of templates look like? How much do interwiki versions of a template overlap?
  • How much of the template population is documented for use?
  • What is the case for substitution?

Leads:

  • Special maintenance pages like Special:MostTranscludedPages (not limited to templates),
  • Break down templates by whether:
    • they have a /doc subpage or similar
    • they have TemplateData
    • they have interwikis
  • Look into real estate occupied by templates (individually and cumulatively per page)
    • Use Parsoid dumps for labeled HTML

Performance

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Questions:

  • How much of the template population is expensive in terms of performance?

Leads:

Initial queries

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See also

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