Hello,

I am one of the Google Summer of Code students and I will be working on improving language support in MediaWiki (in particular with regards to language names) and improving the usability of Wikimedia Incubator (following my previous work on the Incubator-specific extension). More information is available on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:SPQRobin/GSoC/application and I will be posting progress updates on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:SPQRobin/GSoC/notes for who is interested.

My first work will be the MediaWiki core part, for language names. I will implement a language names cache (likely CDB) and I will make English language names available in MediaWiki by default (as I once proposed on wikitech), similar to the list currently in the Babel extension (which would then be no longer needed). This would avoid duplication and make language names consistent. The biggest inconsistency currently is a difference between using {{#language:xyz}} and {{#language:xyz|xyz}}, which both give native names, but the first one only uses MediaWiki names and the second one also additional data like CLDR. See https://translatewiki.net/wiki/User:SPQRobin/languages for the difference. To make them consistent, I want to make our MediaWiki language names (in Names.php) lowercase where this is usual (like: Français -> français). I don't mind if it is displayed lowercase, but maybe others do (for example in the interwiki sidebar). Plus, it might cause problems for pages/templates using {{#language}} that depend on this difference between MediaWiki and CLDR names.

Any idea, comment or feedback is welcome :)

Regards, Robin