Topic on Help talk:Extension:TemplateWizard/Flow

Going by the screenshots and by the actual wishlist item, it seems obvious that some things were completely missed.

1. No menu to filter types of templates (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T55590) - The wishlist seems to specifically ask for an infobox wizard and talks about newbies, but there is neither any way to filter only those infoboxes, quote templates, or anything else. This could be implemented by either fetching most used templates in a category or using wikidata to get them in non-english wikis, e.g. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q19887878.
2. Date type is not properly supported - It seems that the wizard either has a limited interpretation of the templatedata spec, or simply ignores it. The spec also allows the use of time in addition to dates. But this doesn't seem possible with this tool. Arguably, the templatedata spec should be improved to indicate the expected output format.
3. Inability to select from a list of items (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T53375) - the wishlist item talks a lot about invalid structures. This doesn't address wrong template input, e.g choosing a country name from a dropdown.

Hello. Thanks for taking the time to reply! I will address your points below -

1. When we started working on this project, we realized it could be useful for all kinds of templates and restricting it to just infoboxes seemed like a waste. You can still quite easily search for all infobox templates by using the search function. We thought about the idea for showing popular templates for new users but that is actually quite complex to compute, technically. We then settled on the idea of showing recently used templates for each user (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T194434) but we haven't implemented that yet.
2. For this point, can you give me a specific example where you don't see date type supported correctly? We did test this feature but it seems like we missed some use cases.
3. You are actually the first person to bring this to our attention as it was not mentioned in the wishlist proposal or any of the project page discussions I had with users. This seems like a very useful thing to have. I cannot commit to working on this currently as the team has several other projects to go through before the year end but we will definitely keep it on our list of things to do in the long-term.

Thank you so much.

It is certainly useful to be able to insert all templates. But the request stressed newbies, and newbies don't often know what templates even exist. They might as well type random stuff in the search box, remember that wikis in different languages may have named them quite differently. It would only need to list some 10 most used templates within specific categories to give the user a hint. It certainly would not need to list the thousands of templates that wikis have. There's also a lot of free whitespace that could contain that.

The date parameter isn't supported properly because the widget being used only shows dates, not time. There was also a hint of it here:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Tech/Template_wizard#Inserting_dates. So for example, it can only insert stuff like "2014-05-09" but never "2014-05-09T16:01:12Z". See (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T100206#2197740). Try pasting that longer date in the templatewizard date input and it will simply be discarded.

About point 3, maybe they thought it was obvious, but some users make mentions about template parameters being added incorrectly : "On frwiki too template editors ask bot maintainers to change parameters of infoboxes. Here it seems to want to take the problem at the root for page creations. with a tool to directly add the right syntax.".

Anyway, thanks for the explanations...

Also, generally, it might be a good idea to pull in all templates currently on the page, and make it possible to insert them...

Sorry about the late reply. This got lost in my inbox. So one of the reasons it's hard to find "popular" templates is because generally the MOST transcluded templates are meta/banner templates. Which aren't meant to be used by themselves. But it's not trivial for the software to be able to recognize that. So the only workaround I see to this is for us to allow every wiki to configure what the list of popular templates would be for their wiki. This isn't exactly straightforward either and is likely to spark some wars on what templates are important enough to be shown in the list.

I do completely agree that giving a new user a completely empty screen is not a good experience.

About the dates, I will create a Phabricator to investigate this issue and see if we can find a solution for it. Thanks for raising this.

So one of the reasons it's hard to find "popular" templates is because generally the MOST transcluded templates are meta/banner templates.

This was true. However, end-users have already solved that problem by A) categorizing such templates B) adding it to wikidata . For instance, if I wanted to know what are the most used templates that fit into neat types that are likely useful for the average user:

1. Get list of most used templates Special:MostTranscludedPages
2. Get specific categories of templates linked through wikidata (https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?search=&search=haswbstatement%3AP279%3DQ11266439&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go)
3. Fetch infoboxes, navigation boxes, and other lists from wikidata:
4. Filter list #1 by lists fetched in #3 using interwiki links, and show about 10 infoboxes, and 10 navboxes, simply excluding anything that doesn't fit into selected categories.

Probably the most useful templates are utility templates, such as template:date, template:formatdate, quote, etc. Although they currently aren't classified properly in wikidata, this would be trivial for volunteers. This would also make it possible to warn users when they are attempting to insert a template that doesn't belong in a content namespace, e.g. documentation templates ( https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4608595).

Alternatively, if it is deemed unfeasible, it might be possible to handle tasks https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T165053 or https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T166525 . Either the latter or the wikidata solution seems like it should have certainly been part of this project because it specifically asked for an infobox insert tool and it was mutated into something else (for good reasons) with an empty screen.

For the dates, it seems simple enough to use the date picker used in Special:ApiSandbox#action=query&format=json&list=recentchanges .

It might generally be a good idea to clarify the exact specifications and limitations of future wishlist requests before perusing them.