A naming issue has come up.  In https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Writing_systems/Syntax there are two categories of rules: "bidirectional" and "unidirectional".

First, before I ask more: if you are a user of LanguageConverter on your home wiki, did you know that there was more than one type of rule?  And if so, do you call them "bidirectional"/"unidirectional" or something else?

These names appear in the HTML DOM emitted by Parsoid (see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Specs/HTML/1.5.0#Language_conversion_blocks).  There was concern that "bidir" as a field name would be confusing; in particular that people would confuse this with RTL/LTR issues or the Unicode "bidi" algorithm; neither of which are related at all.

As a user of LanguageConverter, do you find this naming confusing?  If Visual Editor described these types of rules with a different name (say, "symmetric"/"asymmetric") would that be a help or harm or neither?

The history of the "bidirectional" name in the PHP code appears to date back to 2008 as far as I can tell ( https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/commit/69dbeb97f15b65dd5773852d76c3bc93caefc862 ) but they haven't been strongly exposed in the UI AFAIK.  Perhaps they are present in the UI for the noteTA gadget ( https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Gadget-noteTA.js )?

At any rate, I'm be interested in any thoughts or comments from folks who use LanguageConverter regularly.

  -- scott

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