On 31/08/06, Raimond Spekking <raimond.spekking(a)gmail.com> wrote:
A very very nice tool. It's new to me and I will
use it in the future.
But we need on Commons a technique to show only those translations of
the users language (stored in preferences) with a fallback option to
englisch and/or all.
Also usefull for the display of multilanguage descriptions in galleries.
This can be achieved via CSS, for individual users. Put this into your
monobook.css:
.description { display: none; }
.en { display: block; }
.de { display: block; }
This will hide all descriptions by default, then show any English or German.
The major problem with this is that the vast majority of text is
incorrectly or not at all tagged. This technique works for things
tagged like
{{en|Explanation or caption}}
It won't work for things like
{{English}} Explanation or caption
or
'''en:''' Explanation or caption
There is a technique being developed at Meta called "Language select"
(
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Language_select ), which uses
Javascript and CSS, but is also not site-wide. (See that talk page for
discussion about using it on Commons)
I guess what we actually need is another entry in Special:Preferences
along the lines of 'show these languages' on multilingual sites.
Because for the interface, you can only set one language, whereas
there are many multilingual people who would be interested in having
multiple languages shown. There are also administrative types like
myself who are interested in seeing all languages, even though I can't
read most of them, to notice what kind of coverage we have, which
languages are needed, spot obvious vandalism, etc.
cheers
Brianna