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Proposal:Include standard and frequently-used templates in the editing toolbar

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  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content
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Summary

The editing toolbar in Wikipedia articles should include additional common templates (such as citation templates) in a manner similar to the existing functions for including external and internal links, embedded files, and references. This would make referencing easier for many contributors.

Proposal

The addition of a number of commonly-used templates to the Wikipedia editing toolbar. This should include preferred methods of citation (e.g. quote, cite web, and cite journal), meta-tags (such as fact), and common infoboxes, among others.

Motivation

The drive to improve the referencing and overall quality of Wikipedia articles is potentially impeded by ignorance of methods of quoting citation and standard templates for doing this. At present, editors who wish to reference articles must become familiar with the standards and procedures for doing so by reading through a number of separate articles detailing how this is done; these articles and the templates detailed in them are not immediately accessible from the editing page.

The addition of common citation templates alongside other frequently-used templates in a sub-menu of the editing toolbar would therefore provide easy access for editors to templates important to creating a well-presented, well-structured, and well-referenced article. This would potentially allow a greater number of editors to ensure that the contents of an article are properly verifiable, and increase the proportion of references included by casual or less-experienced editors.

Key Questions

  • Which templates warrant inclusion?
  • How will editors be made aware of this change?
  • How will templates be represented (names, icons, text boxes to enter details into)?
  • How will the templates be arranged and grouped?
  • How will editors be directed to appropriate template documentation?

Potential Costs

  • Consultation time to fully investigate which templates are necessary
  • Development time and associated costs to add the feature into the editing toolbar

References

Community Discussion

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