Chad hett schreven: > You're hitting on a core issue here, which is the lack of > support for multilingual projects. Mediawiki does not > currently support this. Using hacks such as uselang has > helped hide the issue, but its far from ideal. I would > venture that multilingual content could be handled > with the user's language setting/headers/uselang > param being helpful to show the appropriate content. > Until that happens, each project only has one content > language. In cases like the ones you mentioned, this > happens to be English. The facts are correct, but if you thereby implicate that English thus should be regarded as a valid output for non-English users of those projects, I don't agree. This implication is wrong. > Let's suppose I use the French > Wikipedia with Arabic interface. I would find it very > odd that the content is not in French, even though I > use Arabic as my interface language. > The average user with a non-technical approach does not feel a strict distinction between "interface" (served by the php scripts) and "content" (rendered from database content). Especially on file description pages (file history and file links for example appear as headings just in the same way as the content headings). It won't seem odd to me. > On multilingual projects, its ok to present in your user > language. On single-language projects it is not. Using > uselang for content is an icky hack anyway. Multilingual > projects need to be supported in core, or we're just > going to perpetuate these hacks. > The ways of achieving and accessing may change in the future, but you will never have a clear separation of "content" and localizable elements. Multilang support can be as core as imaginable, but still you will have localizable elements stored in "content" areas. > Basically, I figured support the majority of cases (single > language projects) rather than the minority (multi- > language projects). The former get the benefit of the > hack, the latter see no change. > > -Chad Well, you could put it in other terms and the majority/minority thing switches: content lang allows localization for monolang projects only, when user lang allows it for _all_ projects. So content lang is the minority. Whether Arabic file description pages for users of the French Wikipedia preferring Arabic is a good or a bad thing is not decided and not even decidable. There are some points for content lang, but no strong points. There are some points for user lang, but no strong points either. If there are equally good points for both solutions this supports my interpretation of the majority/minority relation. Your interpretation is based on the assumption that content lang on monolang projects is _obviously_ a good thing.
Marcus Buck _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
