Forwarding from wikitech-l to mediawiki-i18n, as it's of high relevance.
Please make sure to include Yuri in your reply, as I'm afraid he is not
subscribed.
On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 2:31 AM, Yuri Astrakhan <yuriastrakhan(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> TLDR: if browsing a map for French wiki, and a city only has a Russian and
> Chinese name, which one should be shown? Should the city name have
> different rules from a store or a street name? ...
>
> I have been hacking to add unlimited multilingual support to Wikipedia
> maps, and have language fallback question: given a list of arbitrary
> languages for each map feature, what is the best choice for a given
> language?
>
> I know Mediawiki has language fallbacks, but they are very simple (e.g. for
> "ru", if "ru" is not there, try "en").
>
> Some things to consider:
> * Unlike Wikipedia, where readers go for "meaning", in maps we mostly need
> "readability".
> * Alphabets: Latin alphabet is probably the most universally understood,
> followed by...? Per target language?
> * Politics: places like Crimea tend to have both Russian and Ukrainian
> names defined, but if drawing map in Ukrainian, and some feature has
> Russian and English names, but not Ukrainian, should it be shown with the
> Russian or Ukrainian name?
> * When viewing a map of China in English, should Chinese (local) name be
> shown together with the English name? Should it be shown for all types of
> features (city name, street name, name of the church, ...?)
>
> Thanks!
>