On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 1:39 PM, Trevor Parscal <tpars...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > On 9/10/09 10:06 AM, Aryeh Gregor wrote: >> On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 6:50 PM, Tim Starling<tstarl...@wikimedia.org> wrote: >> >>> I don't know why you're writing this nonsense, you obviously haven't >>> looked at the code at all. >>> >> This paragraph is unnecessary. >> > Seriously! Please read things aloud before clicking send. You will > hopefully then be able to better detect when it's time to take a break, > eat some fruit and take it down a notch. >>> The language variant system that we have could easily convert between >>> US and UK English. In fact it already does convert between a language >>> pair with a far more complex relationship, that is Simplified and >>> Traditional Chinese. >>> >>> The language conversion system is very simple, it's just a table of >>> translated pairs, where the longest match takes precedence. The >>> translation table in one direction (e.g. UK -> US) can be different to >>> the table in the other direction (US -> UK). You would not list "ize >>> -> ise", you would list every word in the dictionary with an -ize >>> ending that can be translated to -ise without controversy. The current >>> software could handle 50k pairs or so without serious performance >>> problems, and it could be extended and optimised to allow millions of >>> pairs if there was a need for that. >>> >>> It's possible to handle any pair of languages which are separated only >>> by vocabulary, and transliteration or spelling. It's only differences >>> in grammar, such as word order, that would give it trouble. >>> >> Is there any reason nobody's tried adding such support for us/uk >> English? It would resolve some long-standing tension on enwiki. >> Would anons have to be given one variant or the other, or would they >> get untransformed text or what? Does the variant transformation apply >> to the edit page as well? >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Wikitech-l mailing list >> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l >> > The variant system seems poorly understood by most people (including me) > which often tends to cause something (like it for instance) to also be > under-utilized... > > Perhaps we need more information on what it intends to provide the user. > All I find in Google on this topic are blurbs about configuration > variables and lots of people confused as to what language variants even > are... > > Is there some awesome documentation somewhere I have yet to find? > > - Trevor > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l >
Nope, but there's a bug asking for documentation :) https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19044 I certainly agree that it's completely undocumented and thus not usable to many people. The vast majority of devs--myself included--don't even understand how it works, much less how to use it. Maybe if we had docs, it'd be more usable outside of the (very) small minority who do use and maintain it. -Chad _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
