Wikipedia:WikiProject Accessibility/Top priority issues with templates
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Here is a small list of long awaited key improvements to make, often important for several aspects of web quality.
As major changes in templates are often long and tedious to make (and also to gather consensus on the said changes), we should aim to maximize the value of these changes, and aim for quality in a broad way. Improving care of accessibility, usability, semantics, and front-end web speed altogether when possible. Back-end template performance should also be taken into account when relevant.Extremely large templates - especially when they have multiple levels of inclusions (transclusion depth) - lengthen strongly the time necessary for the servers to prepare an uncached page, up to 10 - 20 seconds, or more. Since the current revision of articles are cached, most of the time the templates doesn't have an influence at all. But when users have specific account configurations, browse archived pages or request uncached pages, large templates are an important burden on the servers. We shouldn't focus too much on performance, but we shouldn't play dumb either: many templates have obvious and detrimental performance issues.
Most widely used templates
We should make a list of the 200 most widely used templates and review them carefully, monitor their changes, etc. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Accessibility/Most widely used templates.
Table templates
= Easy to fix templates =
- {{strong|Mostly done}}. Template:Increase, Template:Steady and Template:Decrease, now use an icon with alt text. [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:DecreasePositive&diff=395363313&oldid=392953028 Template:DecreasePositive] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:IncreaseNegative&diff=395363677&oldid=392974005 Template:IncreaseNegative] are fixed too. Contrast could eventually be improved.
== Infobox ==
Without changing the layout nor making big changes:
- {{done}} Template:Infobox/row - included in more than 782589 articles. With this most of the job is done, Template:Infobox is awesome and {{em|must}} be used
- "font-size:88%": I will definitely try my hardest to have the default text size in Template:Infobox set back to default. Small font size are hard to read, and thus reduce usability. This was proved by scientific reading studies, small text size can lengthen the reading rate by 1.5 (for example, a text that you could read in 20 seconds in normal size (12 points) could take you 30 seconds in smaller size (10 points). See Wikipedia:WikiProject Usability/Readability guidelines
- {{done}} Template:Infobox artist discography - but very lacking from a design point of view
=== Remaining Infobox that needs to be converted to Template:Infobox ===
- Template:Infobox ship characteristics
- User:Matthew25187/Infobox tram network, [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29&curid=3252662&diff=393961025&oldid=393952821 review]
- and many more, please help find them.
== Templates-based tables ==
- {{done}} Template:VG series reviews : [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:VG_series_reviews&diff=395353755&oldid=336784246 most important fix is done], [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:VG_series_reviews&diff=prev&oldid=397369390 improved with scope="row" and plainrowheaders]
- {{done}} Template:Pinyintable, [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Pinyintable&diff=prev&oldid=397368737 done]
- {{done}} Template:US DemogTable, [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:US_DemogTable&diff=418638778&oldid=296118699 fixed in march 2011]
- Template:Infobox US university ranking, was [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template%3AInfobox_US_university_ranking&action=historysubmit&diff=397191637&oldid=385335555 fixed in 2010], but since it was [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Infobox_US_university_ranking&diff=next&oldid=454309670 massively deteriorated in 2011].
== Citation templates ==
- Template:Quote box: should use the blockquote tag. DIVs within the textual content should be replaced by SPANs (the enclosing paragraph P can then be generated correctly by MediaWiki).
= Harder to fix =
== Template-based tables ==
- {{t|VGtitle}}
- {{t|MedalTop}}
- Template:VG requirements
- Template:Video game reviews
- Template:Video game titles
- {{t|AchievementTable}}
- Template:PersonalRecords, {{t|PersonalRecordsTop}} and {{t|PersonalRecordsSport}} [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:PersonalRecordsSport&diff=395423251&oldid=112257737 partially fixed]
- Template:Infobox weather
- Template:MIinttop (see M-28 (Michigan highway))
- Template:Jctint and all subordinate templates such as Template:CAint. These only mark the mile column cells as row headings. The state, county, and location columns would best be rendered as rowgroup headings and individual cells would best render with the header attribute added. This would best be accomplished at the code level without requiring re-editing of pages using that template.
- Template:Year3
- Emiel Puttemans and the like
- {{t|Fieldhockeybox}}
- Template:Largest cities of Italy
- List of accolades received by Precious
- Template:Track listing, inline colors (use CSS instead for customization and optimization), needs structure improvements
== Others ==
Timelines
= Replacement by tables =
Notes:
- Template:Bar graph has potential to be widely used, and replace several timelines;
- The method used at the French template :fr:Modèle:Pyramide des âges may prove to be useful.
Headers templates
- Template:Documentation/preload, [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Documentation/preload&diff=prev&oldid=418640095 fixed in march 2011]
Templates that can easily be misused
Usage of these templates should be checked on a regular basis.
Cross-wiki ban of HiddenStructure
See Wikipedia:HiddenStructure. The hiddenstructure class was removed from skins in bugzilla:17009. It may remain in several wikis' local common.css.
- [http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spezial:Suche&redirs=1&search=hiddenstructure&fulltext=Search&ns10=1&title=Spezial:Suche&advanced=1&fulltext=Advanced+search Some uses remain at de.wiki], about 14 templates.
- [http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Common.css&diff=72221250&oldid=71921365 Problem solved at fr.wiki], since November 2011.
Low priority improvements
Notes
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