Forum:Adopting Wikipedia templates

Is there any reason that we can't use wikipedia templates regularly? I mean, I'm the first person to get huffed up about copying wikipedia when we could be doing our own work... but there are cases where it's just impractical to not borrow their innovations. In this specific case I'm talking about their Navigation Box template. I'm no coder myself really, but I'm kind of tired of settling on navboxes that look like they were designed by an eight-year-old, especially when something so much better already exists on a sister project. Is there any way we could adopt this template as a standard feature across wikias? I feel like a lot of projects would benefit. -- Billy Arrowsmith (Talk), 12:52, April 23, 2010 (UTC)


 * Wikia's javascript for the navigation templates is different from that of Wikipedia, and thus there will be some differences. Wikipedia's templates are also incredibly and overly complex, which is okay when there are dozens of seasoned editors on hand, but not ideal when the majority of founders of wikis on Wikia know very little. As some contributors will attest to, copying one Wikipedia template generally results in having to copy over a dozen more templates that are transcluded inside the original template, as well as fixes to adapt to Wikia so that it displays properly. It would be more practical to use the Wikia equivalents - although new wikis don't come with these templates (some wikis don't use navboxes), users can create these themselves quite easily. An explanation of how to make collapsible tables and divs can be found here. The 888th Avatar   (talk)  13:52, April 23, 2010 (UTC)


 * Actually, there's a basic navbox that comes with every new wiki. 13:54, April 23, 2010 (UTC)


 * (What I meant was the collapsible nav templates ;)) The 888th Avatar   (talk)  14:15, April 23, 2010 (UTC)


 * I have the complete wikipedia Navbox template set as used on wikipedia working on my wiki. Originaly it had several issues, till wikia fixed there mediawiki installation. A few navboxes still have problems but thats due to 'bad' HTML in the individual nav boxes (wikipedia is more tolerant to it). See Navbox is the start of the template but it has many sub templates in the full set.


 * Note you also need the documentation teplate & it many sub templates for it to work properly. The Actual documentation was what caused me a lot of problems as it calls many other templates used in the examples. Originally to get it functioning i had to get Uberfuzy & others to sort some bits out.


 * As Ose & Avatar have said Wikipedia,s implementation is over complex, but at the time I started the template wiki ad the dev wiki were not around so there was no wikia optimised alternatives about. The 'lite' version is alot simpler but some templates will need recreation in a simplified form to work but that could involve less work than the many hours I spent getting the wikipedia version to 'run' OK. - BulldozerD11 15:11, April 23, 2010 (UTC)

I'm aware that we have an existing basic template, but it's lousy. I mean, it's okay for rudimentary purposes, but there's not very much you can do with it. This is the difference. Wikipedia template, amazing. Wikia template, suck. Is there anyway we could get anything better? I don't think having something like that lying around would be too complicated... anybody who couldn't get it to work could just use the regular navbox, I'm not saying that should be deleted. I feel like this isn't something that should take hours pouring over wikipedia code every time someone wants to implement it...
 * - Billy Arrowsmith (Talk), 14:21, April 27, 2010 (UTC)

That navbox looks surprisingly similar to the one from Fallout Wikia. Just change the color codes and it should be possible to fabricate an exact replica. -- Light Daxter |  Talk  15:16, April 27, 2010 (UTC)