Hi!
You mean the MediaWiki message processing code? This
would probably be
Yes, exactly.
powerful enough for units as well, but it works based
on message strings
that look a bit like MW template calls. Someone has to enter such
strings for all units (and languages). This would be doable but the
added power comes at the price of more difficult editing of such message
strings instead of plain labels.
True. OTOH, we already have non-plain strings in the database - e.g.
math formulae - so that would be another example of such strings. It's
not ideal but would be a start, and maybe we can have some gadgets later
to deal with it :)
Oh yes :)
Russian is one, but I'm sure there are others.
Forgive my ignorance; I was not able to read the example you gave there.
Sorry, it's hard to give examples in foreign languages that would be
comprehensible :) The gist of it is that Russian, as many other
inflected languages, changes nouns by grammatical case, and uses
different cases for different number of items (i.e. 1, 2, and 5 will
use three different cases). Labels are of course in singular nominative
case, which is wrong for many numbers.
--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org