Proposal for removal without deprecation of capitalize-all-nouns skin functionality from MW core - Design

19 Jul 2021

Hi all,
we propose to remove `capitalize-all-nouns` skin functionality from
MediaWiki core without deprecation in 1.37.

Patch to remove: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/435638
Patch to continue functionality in Monobook:
Bug: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T97892
Existing uses:
https://codesearch.wmflabs.org/search/?q=MagicWord%3A%3AclearCache&i=no…

MediaWiki core has a feature whereby the setting $capitalizeAllNouns = true
can be set in a LanguageXx.php file. When this is set, OutputPage attaches
the `capitalize-all-nouns` CSS class to the page <body> element. The only
languages for which $capitalizeAllNouns = true are German and languages
with German as a fallback (e.g. Alemannic).
The only widely used skin using this has been Monobook to disable lowercase
transformation of tab titles for those languages. A few other skins might
have applied the same functionality when basing on top of Monobook.
We've copied this obscure functionality over to Monobook in the meantime
and would recommend doing so for your skin if you like to continue to use
it.
In any case, as this removal results in a non-existing CSS class mostly
rendering of some elements of the skin in some languages would change
slightly.
Please note, that no other modern Wikimedia deployed skin has used this
ever since Monobook.

Thanks to volunteer Jack Phoenix and my colleague Jon Robson for driving
this work.

Regards,
Volker