Templates/Taxonomy

Scope

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

Purpose

Questions:

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

Leads:

• Look at template categories: w:Category:Wikipedia templates (d:Q3740), w:Category:Wikipedia template categories (d:Q3760)
• Look into breakdown of templates by namespace

Construction

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

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

Questions:

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

Leads:

• w:Wikipedia:Template limits, preprocessor node count, etc.

Initial queries

• Number of all templates on en.wikipedia (599,646 as of 2015-01-05)
• Number of non-redirect templates on en.wikipedia (482,020 as of 2015-01-05)
• Number of templates using a Lua module on en.wikipedia (379,910 as of 2015-01-05)
• Templates/Taxonomy/Most transcluded/wikipedia/en/2015-01-05: An up-to-date version of w:en:Special:MostTranscludedPages. This includes all namespaces, so mixes templates and Lua modules
• Templates/Taxonomy/Most transcluded templates/wikipedia/en/2015-01-05: An up-to-date version of w:en:Special:MostTranscludedPages restricted to templates (namespace 10).

See also

• Notes