Board Thread:New Features/@comment-5558012-20151119135048/@comment-118323-20151121003657

I'm happy to provide a bit of context on Template Types. You can read more on Tim's blog Template Types: A Smarter Categorization System but here's my direct take on this feature, as the Product Manager responsible:

The goal for Template Types is to understand the purpose of every template so Wikia can provide better editing features and a better reader experience on mobile.

@Yatalu already said it quite well, above. :) We have the ability to automatically set the Type of a good majority of templates via pattern recognition but as Wikia hosts 400,000+ communities, the variety of construction and naming conventions makes it impossible to accurately understand all templates. This is why we built the tool to have admins and other users participate in classification.

When we have 100% of templates classified we can achieve some interesting things: Rather than treating all templates the same we can start to build specialized experiences for each unique type. The first example of this is the new “Pages without Infoboxes” Insights list that released today. We also want to use this information when people are editing articles — rather than suggesting “add a template” we can suggest “This page does not have a quote. Would you like to add one?”

The second benefit of Template Types is it allows Wikia to understand the information in a deeper way so we can more intelligently display it on non-desktop screens. (This is an important goal of our Portability initiative as a whole.) For example — Navbox templates look great and are clicked a lot by readers on desktop, but they look messy on the mobile web and are rarely tapped. We’re following a pattern set by Wikipedia and are hiding them on the mobile web skin. Other templates, however, we will make look even better. Soon, context-links and quotes will look sleek and different from regular paragraph text.

The third benefit (which is kind of a freebie) is Template Types give us an opportunity to make template management and organization more powerful on your community. This is manifested in Special:Templates right now, but I expect this data will be utilized in other locations around the wiki.

Over the past few weeks we’ve worked hard to decide the exact list that appears in the feature. We ultimately landed on this list of 12 because people were the most successful at selecting the correct option from this list. I 100% expect this list to change over time and we are very seriously looking into ways to make the list customizable, while still retaining the structure we need in order for this endeavor to be worthwhile.

In more immediate news we're working on some logic to automatically classify /doc templates and others as "Non-article." We also have a few improvements that should release in early December to make this a nicer experience.

Feedback and more questions welcomed!