User:Sophivorus/Signpost Opinion1

First steps
Almost 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
So 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 Multilingual Templates and Modules.