Hi all! Tomorrow's RFC discussion[1] on IRC (22:00 UTC at #wikimedia-office) will be about my proposal to use Parser::getTargetLanguage to allow wiki pages to be generated in different languages depending on the user's interface language [2].
I would like to take this opportunity to gather some input beforehand about how we can improve MediaWiki's support for multilingual wikis on the parser level. In particular, I'm interested to learn about the implications my proposal has for the Translate extension, the templates currently used on commons, sites that use automatic transliteration, etc. Some context: Currently, MediaWiki doesn't really have a concept of multilingual content. But some wikis, like Commons and Wikidata, show page content in the user's language, using a veriety hacks implemented by extensions such as Translate and Wikibase. It would be nice to make MediaWiki aware of multilingual content, and add some limited suppor for this to core. Some bits and pieces already exist, but that don't quite work for what we need. One issue is that parser functions (and Lua code) have no good way to know what the target language for the current page rendering is. Both ParserOptions and Parser have a getTargetLanguage method, but this is used *only* when displaying system messages in a different language on pages like MediaWiki:Foo/fr. I propose to change core so it will set the target language in the parser options to the user language on wikis/namespaces/pages marked as multilingual. This would allow parser functions and Lua libraries to generate content in the desired target language. There is another related method, which I propose to drop, or at least move: Title::getDisplayLanguage (resp ContentHandler::getDisplayLanguage). This seems to be used by wikis that apply transliteration to page content, but it's a but the semantics ar ea it unclear. I propose to drop this in favor of ParserOptions::getTargetLanguage, since the display language is not a property of the page, but an option defined for the rendering of the page. Another related issue is anonymous browsing of multi-lingual content. This will either go past the web cache layer (as is currently done on commons), or it's simply not possible (as currently on wikidata). I have put up an RFC for that as well[3], to be discussed at a different time. [1] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/E89> [2] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T114640> [3] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T114662> -- Daniel Kinzler _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
