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Excerpts: Content reuse within Wikipedia
First steps
editAlmost three years ago, I thought it would be a good idea to merge the Metaphysics section of the Spanish article on Philosophy, with the lead section of the Metaphysics article, and then replace the section for a transclusion of the lead section. After all, they were both summaries of the same topic and had very similar content. So I merged them, created a simple template (based on the #lsth parser function) to transclude lead sections and did replacement. It worked wonderfully: both the Metaphysics section and the Metaphysics article had improved and improving one would now improve the other!
But why stop there? Why not do the same with the sections on Ethics, Logic, Epistemology, History and every other with a main article? Slowly but surely, one by one I merged the content and replaced it for excerpts. No one reverted, no one complained, it was clearly a win-win situation.
But why stop there? Next I went into the Metaphysics article. There I replaced the sections that had main articles (Ontology, Causality, etc) for excerpts of said main articles, after merging the content of course. Same with the articles on Logic, Ethics, etc. Slowly, a sort of tree started to emerge. I manually drew it on my sandbox and every week I helped it grow bigger. A wonderful process!
But why stop there? This was clearly not limited to Philosophy. Next, I tackled Science. Oh, the potential! History, Methodology, Branches, Community, every section had a main article, and every main article had its own sections with more main articles. Again, ant work, step by step I merged and replaced, and I watched the tree grow and flourish.
But why stop there? Next came Argentina (my country) followed by Climate change, Global warming and more recently COVID-19 pandemic. Somewhere along the path, I was made aware of Module:Excerpt, a module that offered much greater control of what elements to transclude. The template evolved to use this module and became more sophisticated and versatile. New users and uses appeared, such as reusing TV episode tables, election results and sports statistics.
But why stop there? This year I requested a Rapid Grant to help excerpts spread beyond Spanish. It was a difficult process, because the template and module were not designed to be cross-wiki, but now I'm happy to announce that they are fully available on the English, German, Portuguese, Italian and French wikis, and many more are likely to follow since the technology is now fully cross-wiki.
Next steps
editSo what now? I think the next challenge will be to keep the technology the same across languages. I made a huge effort to adapt the template and module to the standards set out at mw:Multilingual Templates and Modules.
This page is a draft for the next issue of the Signpost. Below is some helpful code that will help you write and format a Signpost draft. If it's blank, you can fill out a template by copy-pasting this in and pressing 'publish changes': {{subst:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Story-preload}}
Images and Galleries
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To put an image in your article, use the following template (link):  I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art. This will create the file on the right. Keep the 300px in most cases. If writing a 'full width' article, change
Placing (link) will instead create an inline image like below  The significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.
To create a gallery, use the following Each line inside the tags should be formatted like
If you want it centered, remove t |
.jpg)
Quotes
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To insert a framed quote like the one on the right, use this template (link): If writing a 'full width' article, change
To insert a pull quote like
use this template (link):
To insert a long inline quote like
use this template (link): |
Side frames
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Side frames help put content in sidebar vignettes. For instance, this one (link): gives the frame on the right. This is useful when you want to insert non-standard images, quotes, graphs, and the like.
A caption
For example, to insert the {{Graph:Chart}} generated by in a frame, simple put the graph code in to get the framed Graph:Chart on the right. If writing a 'full width' article, change |
Two-column vs full width styles
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If you keep the 'normal' preloaded draft and work from there, you will be using the two-column style. This is perfectly fine in most cases and you don't need to do anything. However, every time you have a However, you can also fine-tune which style is used at which point in an article. To switch from two-column → full width style midway in an article, insert where you want the switch to happen. To switch from full width → two-column style midway in an article, insert where you want the switch to happen. |
Links and such
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By the way, the template that you're reading right now is {{Editnotices/Group/Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue}} (edit). A list of the preload templates for Signpost articles can be found here. |
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