The Signpost

WikiProject report

Meet the boilerplate makers

Can't work without 'em, if you're working on a wiki, but it seems that many Wikipedians can't work with 'em, either. Templates, of course – the backbone of every page providing layout, banners, infoboxes, and fancy links that change around when you refresh the page. Luckily, we have a team of editors super-versed in how to manipulate the markup to produce the final result that we want, providing a smooth and (hopefully) stylish appearance to the reader. WikiProject Templates, with a current membership of around 60, helps to do the following:

  1. Conducting efforts to better organise, document and display all templates in the template namespace, including: navigation templates, infobox templates, inline templates linking country articles, stub types, image copyright tags and user language templates (Babel).
  2. Solving specific templates issues, such as standardisation and locations.
  3. Improving the general documentation on how to create and use templates, in addition to improving the documentation pages of the individual templates.
  4. Clean-up of the unused, unneeded and/or redundant templates, using the templates for discussion (TfD) process and guidelines.
  5. Providing help and guidance in creating, updating, correcting and testing templates.
  6. Improving template accessibility

That's rather a big remit when all looked at together, so to give us more of an idea, we interviewed APerson, Paine Ellsworth and Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing).

What motivated you to join the project? Do you have a particular interest or proficiency in maintaining templates?

Does WikiProject Templates collaborate with any other projects?

A template allows you to reproduce infinite content.

How would you rate this project's success and participation?

What are WikiProject Templates's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?

Anything else you'd like to add?


The WikiProject report will be taking a break for a couple of weeks while the regular author has a vacation. If you're interested in having a wikiproject that you work with featured in a future report, make sure to drop a note at the Signpost's WikiProject desk, and as always you may take a look in the archive to read previous reports.


















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-08-05/WikiProject_report