Hi Denny,
On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 3:36 AM, Denny Vrandečić denny.vrandecic@wikimedia.de wrote:
(Siebrand, I am unsure if this will arrive at mediawiki-i18n, feel free to forward it you consider it interesting to them).
It does after the list admin approves it, but you may just want to subscribe[1].
OK, I've written a few lines of Python [1] which actually helped me answer my questions. Sorry to bother.
And the answers are yes, yes, no, but close, and i hope so.
No problem. We like people answering their own question. More time for us to do other things :).
There are a small number of wikis which use a different language code than their site code is, namely:
crh -> crh-latn als -> gsw be-x-old -> be-tarask roa-rup -> rup simple -> en
There are a few more, actually. See includes/DefaultSettings.php, $wgDummyLanguageCodes.
But, at the same time, the given *site* codes exist as *language* codes as well, i.e. the languages/messages files exist for them, but they just fallback to the given language code (i.e. MessagesAls.php just names gsw as a fallback).
That's an issue with the Wikimedia setup, I guess. If the language code could be different from the subdomain name, that is what should be done. It's probably not as simple as it looks. See next item.
I would not be surprised if each of these five examples would have an anecdote to explain why they are the way they are :)
That, and a past in which there was less attention for trying to stick to a particular standard. Doesn't really matter, we're stuck with it for now, and should try to not make it worse, and fix it on the long run. For the 5+ years that I'm involved in MediaWiki development, there have been requests to rename wikis to more appropriate subdomain names, but for some reason, no progress has been made on it yet. These 10+ requests are tracked in https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/19986.
P.S.: There is one thing I do not understand though. According to https://simple.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo the language of simple.wp is "en", but MessagesSimple.php seems to be taken into account (instead of "edit" it has "change" in the UI, one of only two changes in MessagesSimple to MessagesEn).
Thanks for mentioning. That shouldn't have been there. Fixed in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/7035/.
So it seems that the language is "simple" -- why does it say "en" in the siteinfo?
Because it *is* English. It just should be English with a reduced vocabulary. There have been many debates in the past over its usefulness, and if possibly other languages should also get a simple vocabulary Wikimedia project (and subdomain). This is just for reference, please do not comment on this in this thread, but start a new one if you'd wish to discuss simple language versions.
Not sure if this made your insight clearer, but at least I hope I was able to add some details :).
[1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n
Cheers!