Hi,

Thanks for the news about Lua, first of all.

The general idea seems valid to consider, but some buy-in from all of these language communities would be needed, and eventually opened as Bugzilla issues.

en-gb -> en is trivial: it doesn't have to be defined explicitly, because English is the default last fallback for all languages.

Of course, comments from speakers of these languages are welcome here as well.


--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬


2014/1/19 Seb35 <seb35wikipedia@gmail.com>
Hello,

Now Lua has access to the internal fallback sequences of MediaWiki [1], so this can be used to gracefully degrade the translation of the templates included in a page, by the means of {{Translatable template}} (also called {{TNT}}) or auto-translated templates which use {{Fallback}}, mainly on Commons. I worked on this yesterday [2].

But I send this message mainly to show the comparison between the fallback sequences of Commons vs MediaWiki [3].

I guess some fallback sequences of Commons could be added to MediaWiki:
* af -> nl
* br -> fr (not sure)
* ckb -> fa
* en-gb -> en
* fy -> nl

There is one conflicting fallback sequence:
* co -> fr (Commons) or it (MediaWiki)

And some differences:
* pdt -> nds, de (Commons) or de (MediaWiki)
* nds -> nds-nl, de (Commons) or de (MediaWiki)
* nds-nl -> nds, nl (Commons) or nl (MediaWiki)

And more importantly, the purposes of the fallback sequences are a bit different inside a same language family/variant family: MediaWiki specializes from general to variants (often by script), but Commons does the opposite: degrades from variants to general. I find a feature could be added in the Translate extension to give access to these "reverse fallback sequences" by comparison to MediaWiki’s ones. This could be implemented either by creating a small database (perhaps add the opposite parameter of $fallback in the MessagesXX.php) either by computing these. This could be used for the translation of the templates, in Special:MyLanguage [bug 48292], and to redirect the translators to the general language (the messages "Translate in zh please." in $wgTranslateBlacklist of CommonSettings.php in Wikimedia config).

[1] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/101910
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Module_talk:Template_translation#Fallback
[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Fallback#Comparison_of_the_fallback_sequences_between_.7B.7BFallback.7D.7D_and_MediaWiki
[bug 48292] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/48292

~ Seb35

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