Forum:Portable Infoboxes (2017)

Hello! I'm Isaac, and I'm representing FANDOM's Community Technical team. We help communities adopt to new technologies and features, like content portability. Call of Duty Wiki is a high priority for introducing Portable Infobox templates, which have a lot of benefits for your community. We've talked about this before back in April 2016, and I wanted to address some of the issues raised previously (and new ones you might have).

Call of Duty Wiki experiences millions of pageviews per week, with 75% of those visits from mobile devices. Portable Infoboxes help your articles to be accessed from any device and the flow of your traffic is as important as it ever was. I'd like to reproduce as much as possible the look and feel of your desktop infoboxes in global CSS, and will update the Infobox templates themselves (initially as Drafts for you to approve or ask for changes to) so that they can be accessible on any current and future platform. Maintaining them if you want to make changes should be very simple, and we have extensive documentation on how to modify Portable Infoboxes in the help pages or on the Portability Hub.

Regarding some of your concerns when we did this before: the Templates themselves would stay in the Template: namespace, protected or not as your community sees fit. The styling, which is the inline CSS code, would be in the MediaWiki: namespace, just like Common.css and Wikia.css. Since nearly all of your styling is consistent throughout multiple infoboxes, these style patterns (we usually call them "themes", but that's just a way of saying "consisently applied style") could be altered in a single place rather than in each template (which saves you work in the long run if you decide to change things up). In terms of access, this also protects you from vandalism a bit. But mostly, it makes it easy to just say  instead of lines and lines of inline styling for each parameter. And, to be fair, your community has not changed the basic look of your infoboxes via inline styling in the last 2 years, so this trade-off to a more centralized and secure stlying system is not depriving you of something you use often. As for the templates themselves, they still can be edited by typical (non-admin) users just as they are now; in fact, using the standard syntax that we've committed to, typical users have plenty of resources to learn how to code infoboxes in a way that we've seen is less intimidating than with wikitext. Our credo on the Portability team is "future-proof", so users should be able to use the same syntax now as they will for years to come.

Improved mobile clarity is not the only reason why we'd like to introduce these; we're looking at all kinds of emerging devices. The Mercury skin and engine let us target all these devices, and the experience is centered around PIs as the focal point. The PIs also improve desktop performance, as the language is built for the server to produce them lightning fast. On mobile, the experience of infoboxes (when they aren't interpreted and stripped of other styling, as with non-portable code) goes from "looks fine" to "looks good". Mercury is another example of FANDOM tech that's going to be around for a while. It's constantly evolving, but the best benefits of new Mercury features will go to communities with portable code. Before you ask, customization of the Mercury skin is not something we're offering at this time, but if and when we do it will be first available for portable communities.

If I can successfully and faithfully reproduce the look and feel of your current infoboxes with high fidelity and present additional proofs of concept for you to see that there's no loss of form or function, would you consider approving them? I can do the coding and styling work myself, and save you from spending your valuable time. We would appreciate your go-ahead, but it is an incremental process and there are multiple stages where you can ask questions or for changes. Please let me know. Thanks! — FishTank (wall) 06:35, December 7, 2017 (UTC)