---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nikola Smolenski <smolensk(a)eunet.yu>
Date: 2008/12/6
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Bring your language to Commons
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
On Saturday 06 December 2008 17:49:04 Lars Aronsson wrote:
New user accounts on Wikimedia Commons automatically
get a
greeting from [[User:Wikimedia Commons Welcome]]. However, this
greeting is in English and not all users speak English. At the
top of the message there is a list of links to translations in
other languages, but I think there is a better way.
Since most new user accounts on Commons (about two thirds) are
created by SUL, and arrive through a link that specifies the
uselang= parameter, wouldn't it be very easy to set the user
preference for user interface language from the uselang parameter
when the account is created by SUL?
The greeting template (and other templates, such as deletion
requests) could then access the user's interface language setting
through a {{USELANG}} magic word, and present the corresponding
translation.
This way, new Swedish speaking users (who typically arrive from
the Swedish Wikipedia, one that doesn't allow local uploads) could
be guided to the Swedish language village pump and find a
community there.
This perhaps isn't directly related to your initial query, but I was thinking
along similar lines on how to make MediaWiki more internationalized.
MediaWiki is, of course, an excellently internationalized piece of software
already. It works excellently with a lot of languages - but what it lacks is
the ability to work with more languages at the same time. This is very
important on Commons or Meta.
The first step would be to make uselang sticky (or to create a new parameter,
for example 'forcelang'), as is the case now with 'variant'. Right now,
when
someone comes to
http://commons.wikimedia.org/?uselang=sr everything is
displayed in Serbian, properly, but when he/she clicks on "Log in / create
account", the interface goes back to English and someone who doesn't know
English can't create the account. But if you go to f.e.
http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5&variant=zh…
you will see that variant parameter is "inherited" by the links on the page,
and whenever you go on the wiki you will remain in the same variant. If
uselang would work in the same way, that's one MAJOR improvement already.
Since a system for doing this with 'variant' already works, I hope this
wouldn't be too hard to do.
And then, what you say. But there exists one caveat - caching. More on this in
some future email :)
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