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Ever since 2011 - when I first began - I had been on this kick to make sure that everyone had access to the information about all our Templates . I got through a personal project in late 2022 and March-June 2023, when I realized that there are inadequate spots where the page listing all of our Templates is located (the page we’re talking about is wikiHow:Templates .

It’s not located in any Special-namespace pages (like some of our tools) and you can’t seem to find it in many spots throughout many articles in main and wikiHow spaces - making this a focus of something that may need to be looked into. Pages that link to “wikiHow:Templates” - wikiHow

  1. Why don’t we integrate this page into several of our tools and pages? One major one I particularly know of is integrating it into the RCP tool where it lists the templates used on the page. This link could serve as an informational link to the page and to cross-reference information about the template to those who aren’t aware of the information.
  2. We could also try adding some functionality to some of our other tools. Even if we link them to the Article templates subpage , they’d have knowledge at their fingertips of other paths for additional help.
  3. When editors try to “edit” their pages in Userspace, we could give them the link to Userspace templates (and those subpages there)… the same with Talk page templates with the subpages to them, though giving them the talk page templates might be redundant.
  4. (Years ago,) I submitted an idea through wikiHow’s IRC channel to give us buttons to help us add templates to diff quick-edit features quicker by pressing a button, and then clicking the template choice, and while I still feel that to be something that might be worthwhile thinking about, I don’t think I’d use it as much as I used to think years ago.
  5. I also went through our wikiHow Functions templates and tied up loose ends there. While some of these apply to articlespace, I would frown upon tying this to too many places.
  6. The ideas I have here are endless, and these are just a few of my thoughts. I feel for us to use them, they need to be seen more often than they currently are - I just don’t know where to place them, or how to add them to the right spots for them to be better used, because as a first-timer years ago, I didn’t even know where to consult to find the page, and this would not only get that information seen but would give us the information we need to be able to use each appropriately.

Would anyone else have ideas to help brainstorm this into action, and would engineers be able to help escalate this into some action - at least into some rainy-day activities?

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Sounds like a great idea, @EpcotMagic !

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This is an interesting idea, but personally I’m not sure how much benefit would come from all the work needed to propose, spec and implement it. I’d be happy for y’all to ideate on this and turn it into a more specific proposal and vote on it as a community if there are a group that want to work on it.

As usual, I then can’t guarantee we’d be able to get engineering time because it’s not something that’s broken or needs to be in place - but if it comes together it could potentially be a rainy day or “one day” project:slight_smile:

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the easiest part of this project, would be to find topics in wikihow space where we could weave that link into, at the very least where people would best be needing to find that info. would you have ideas where it could best be linked to, besides the articles about patrolling (because these all need some updating as well)?

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I personally don’t see the need for it, so I’m probably not the best person to ask:smiley:

Anyone else with some ideas?