On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 3:51 PM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Doesn't it matter more where the file is _displayed_ rather than where
it's hosted?
Indeed. There are three use cases:
1) user looks at image on Commons, wants to reuse it on some other wiki
2) user looks at image on some wiki, wants to reuse it there in a different
article
3) user looks at image on some wiki, wants to reuse it on another wiki
Showing the namespace in the content language would break 3. Showing it in
English would inconvenience 2. Using the subst trick has the optimal result
in terms of saved wikitext (assuming all communities prefer localized
namespace prefixes to English ones) but looks scary.
3 would typically happen when someone browses the interwiki links to find
more content for an article. 2 is probably more frequent on large wikis
which have properly categorized local uploads.
The same question could be asked about the "thumb" keyword in the wikicode
of the thumbnail, although that one probably does not get translated as
often.