Ilmari Karonen wrote:
A popular game
played with a bat and ball is -{en-gb:Cricket;
en-us:Baseball}-.
That reminds me... some time ago, someone proposed to enable
LanguageConverter on Commons (but without any automatic conversion,
presumably) and to (ab?)use it to replace the existing autotranslation
hacks based on {{int:lang}}. Would that be in any sense feasible?
There would presumably be two major use cases: the easy one, which I do
believe the converter should handle just fine, would be to replace the
current <http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:LangSwitch>,
generally used to autotranslate short phrases, with syntax like:
-{de:Eigene Arbeit; en:Own work; fi:Oma teos; fr:Travail personnel; etc.}-
(See <http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Own> for the source of
the example.)
I don't think it's really a saner syntax.
The not-so-simple case would be replacing
<http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Autotranslate>, which is
used to translate entire templates, usually (though by no means
necessarily) combined with a long list of links to the various
translations so that users can easily browse them if the automatically
chosen version is no good or something. A naive implementation of that
would look something like:
-{af: {{GFDL/af}}; als: {{GFDL/als}}; an: {{GFDL/an}}; ar: {{GFDL/ar}};
ast: {{GFDL/ast}}; be: {{GFDL/be}}; be-tarask: {{GFDL/be-tarask}}; <!--
...and so on for about 70 more languages -->}-
(Source: <http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:GFDL>.)
I'd like to hope that there might be some better way of doing it,
though, even if I can't offhand think of what it might look like.
Still, would something like that work, even in theory, and would it be
an improvement over the way these things are currently done (which is
hacky enough itself)?
I don't think so. It's terribly ugly. You would want something like
{{GFDL/{{ENABLEDVARIANT}}}} (no, such magic word doesn't seem to exist yet).
But you would still have the problem of having people *choose* them. You
wouldn't put dozens of tabs to choose the variant. Which in fact isn't a
variant.
These are languages, variant system is not appropiate for them.