Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-08-30/Technology report

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Why not, infoboxes? It would be nice keep versions synchronized by storing them centrally, but the chief impediment is not really copying the templates themselves. Templates are easy to copy and paste, though it can be tedious for large suites of interdependent ones. The more fundamental problem I often encounter is dependence on project-specific custom CSS or Javascript. Sorting out those dependencies can be non-trivial, and requires access to the MediaWiki namespace. Many's the time I have rolled-back or re-worked an imported template because it refused work away from home (and because I didn't have the patience to hack the CSS).
It would be nice if a tool could automagically render them as seen in the source environment, but this is not merely a matter of transclusion. Is the tool up to it? Can we have a link to the mentioned prototype that "anybody" can try? ~ Ningauble (talk) 19:16, 31 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If Wikia's interclusion model is an accurate picture of the current built-in interclusion (interwiki transclusion, if I may coin a term) support in MediaWiki, when it is enabled, an intercluded template currently appears to be parsed prior to intercluding - this means if it relies on other templates which are not on the calling wiki, it will still render correctly, but also means that the template's output cannot be controlled on a per-wiki basis, whether by ParserFunctions or parameters passed (it would be possible to do with span/div classes and IDs, but would be messy). Does the new interclusion model provide any mechanism for such control, or does it work the same way? 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000} 23:08, 31 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The most important effect of such transclusion is the possibility to create a central repository for the interwiki links saving a large amount of bot edits. --Nk (talk) 08:13, 1 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]