2009/9/9 Helder Geovane Gomes de Lima <heldergeov...@gmail.com>:
> Hello!
>
> I noticed at sr.wikipedia there is an option "Variant" under
> "Internationalization" at the preferences. How is that different from
> the 'sr', 'sr-ec' and 'sr-el' which are shown at "Language" option
> (also under "Internationalization")?
>
> I'm interested in this because there are some differences between
> "Brazilian Portuguese" ('pt-br') and "Portuguese of Portugal" ('pt')
> which usually cause troubles for the admins at the Portuguese
> projects, who needs to warn the users not to change the wording of the
> texts from one variant to another (this usually happens, mainly from
> anonymous contributions), because some differences between the
> variants seems to be [at a first glance] a typo, and they want to
> "correct" it...
>
sr-ec and sr-el refer to the Latin and Cyrillic variants of Serbian
(not sure which is which), and AFAIK the software can convert
everything, even article text, because the conversion rules are so
simple that a computer can execute them. Basically, sr-ec and sr-el
have the same text in the same language, but in different alphabets.
(This is my understanding, which may be completely wrong; in that
case, please correct me.)
The difference between pt and pt-br are more delicate than that, and
the two can't be autoconverted between by a computer, because of
differences in spelling word usage and grammar(?).
> So, I would like to know if there is currently any feature which could
> help us to avoid the problem of having a divided community of users
> ('pt' x 'pt-br') "fighting" with each other ad infinitum... (and to
> avoid proposals like that [1] of a new "Brazilian Wikipedia", which
> IMHO will not have any good result, and is not the better way of
> solving the problem...)
>
No. We already offer users the choice between having the interface in
pt or pt-br (or any other language, really), but such a choice doesn't
exist for the content.
> I found
> [http://strategy.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Proposal_talk%3AA_Brazilian_Portuguese_Wikipedia&diff=14163&oldid=13621
> a comment] about the existence of "on-the-fly translation" for some
> languages (Chinese and Serbian), but I don't know how it works, and if
> it solves or improve the situation.
>
That's the alphabet variant thing I mentioned earlier. If the majority
of the differences between pt and pt-br can be summed up with simple
rules that a computer can handle, we might be able to work something
out. However, that's usually not the case; I don't know Portugese, but
I do know that handling even simple differences between en-us and
en-gb is too complex already: a system that would successfully convert
'realise' to 'realize' may also try to wrongfully convert 'disguise'.
> And before this I was also thinking of use (a possible enhanced
> version of) a procedure like this: considering that currently it is
> possible to show a system message using {{int:MESSAGE}} in the
> wikitext in a way that the result changes according to the user's
> language, would it be possible to create new messages at "MediaWiki:"
> Namespace just for defining language variants of words which usually
> appears at the content of the projects? For example, would it be
> possible to create "MediaWiki:WORD/pt-br" and "MediaWiki:WORD/pt", and
> use them (with {{int:WORD}}) instead of the actual word variant in
> wikitext? This isn't likely to be the better solution, but it could be
> a first step towards a solution...
>
This sounds like it could work, but only if the /langcode trick
actually works (I don't know what that depends on) and if there's a
relatively small set of words that makes a relatively big difference
(otherwise it'd be more trouble than it's worth IMO; but that's up to
the community).
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
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