Thread:SavageOpress1138/@comment-1998339-20200121224802

Hey man! Sak & I got to discussing templating during our time in Chat yesterday & came up with a proposal governing user contributions to the Template namespace we'd like you to look over. Sorry in advance for the wall of text&mdash;I feel an overview of the key points is in order so as to provide you the requisite context.

Regarding user-made templates, I've since been operating according to the precedent you tacitly set here, here, & here & outright stated here that "if a similar template already exists among the officially supported & maintained templates, that template should be transcluded in place of a newly created duplicate." In most cases, I've generally gone about implementing this precedent in one of three ways: 1) redirecting the duplicate template to the official template, automatically transcluding the official by default, 2) replacing the duplicate's in-article transclusions with the official template before deleting the duplicate, or 3) updating the official template to reflect desired changes (for example, if a user creates a duplicate because the primary template has not yet been converted to mobile-friendly XML, I update the main template accordingly & delete its duplicate).

I've generally been pretty liberal in my policing of the Template namespace due to the desire to reduce redundant clutter on the namespace, ensure a standardized aesthetic per the Layout Guide, & respect mobile contributors by ensuring only officially supported, mobile-friendly templates are used. Regarding the first two points, issues of aesthetic consistency have always been the purview of the administrative team&mdash;as I told Sak in Chat, that unstated precedent is the reason you two committed to my suggested overhaul of the infobox styling without feeling the need to submit a consensus track thread to the community first (to quote, "a Wiki-wide transformation like this isn't quite a Consensus Track issue..."). In my opinion, templates, infoboxes or otherwise, should share a unified aesthetic & appear similar on any page when viewed on any device.

In addition to ensuring a unified design aesthetic, the requirement that users only transclude officially supported, readily maintained, & mobile-friendly templates also guarantees that all users&mdash;contributors & anonymous mobile viewers alike&mdash;can access pages on any device without issue, per content portability best practices. From what I gather from Community Central threads, a large segment of Wikia's viewing audience & even contributor base is made up of mobile viewers. As such, I figure enforcing the use of officially supported templates optimized for mobile is better than allowing a redundant mess of broken, half-working templates to clutter the namespace. If it were up to me, I would follow Wikipedia's precedent & lock down the Template namespace entirely with the MediaWiki namespace&mdash;while I would welcome user suggestions for new templates (just as Sak welcomes suggestions for new infobox CSS themes for MediaWiki pages), I believe it's best that the creation & editing of templates be left to those versed in template creation & mobile content portability best practices (incidentally, this is Wikipedia's approach as well, encapsulated in the template editor user right).

Since I don't think we can lock down the namespace without submitting a request to Wikia Staff, Sak & I came to the consensus that we should instead have a forum subpage dedicated to user-submitted template proposals. The benefits of such a system would be two-fold: 1) to allow us to check if the proposed template already exists & redirect the user to an extant equivalent accordingly, or 2) allow the user to make a compelling case for either an inextant template's inclusion based on its potential for widespread use or the modification of an existing template by means of the addition of new fields. Per the MediaWiki documentation regarding their intended usage, templates should ideally be useful to multiple users in multiple contexts on multiple pages, not exclusive to overly specific use cases. A proposal system would help ensure that all templates exhibit such wiki-wide utility while not outright limiting user input regarding the creation of new templates.

Your thoughts? 