Gilles Dubuc, 06/05/2014 09:33:
Why doesn't the step where we save wikitext
entered by someone on an
article automatically substitute "File:" for the localized version upon
save?
That would be called a pre-save transform.
Given my limited experience of editing articles, if I was entering
things manually and writing "File:" (or the equivalent in a language I
speak) [...] It should just
magically work.
It does work: canonical and content language are both perfectly valid
wikitext. Some wikis may have different preferences on what version to
use and normalise the wikitext via bots if they care a lot, but I've
never heard of someone so crazy as to blame users using aliases.
Of course that would change if suddenly people were allowed to use a
random language among 300 in wikitext. In that case you can expect
guidelines would pop up everywhere restricting which languages you're
actually expected to use.
Nemo