Hey Yannis,
The discussion list for the localization of the MediaWiki software is actually MediaWiki-i18n, so I've forwarded your e-mail to that list. I've also included Guillaume Paumier and Neil Kandalgaonkar on this e-mail, since they're the ones who made the Upload Wizard. :-)
Thanks for reporting the issues you encountered!
Casey
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Yannis A. yannanth@gmail.com Date: Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 7:08 PM Subject: [Translators-l] Dialects like "en-gb" on MediaWiki extensions To: translators-l@lists.wikimedia.org
I’m not sure if this is the right place to write about this, but there’s something of the problem with the language detection (sorry, I don’t know the technical terms) module of several MediaWiki extensions and templates, such as the newly-released Wikimedia Commons Upload Wizard and... many templates!
For example, when I go over to the Upload Wizard for testing and casual uploading, there's a banner at the top telling me that the language was not found and that it “defaulted back to English”.
Obviously, this would not be a problem with a speaker of British English, but it could potentially be a problem in all sorts of frameworks with someone who picked a language code like “arz”—Egyptian Arabic, which would predictably default to English even though a Standard Arabic version of the tutorial is available, which the average arz speaker would definitely be more familiar with!
The problem, therefore, is how MediaWiki handles dialects as separate languages, and if it’s not fixed now, it could be a much bigger problem as the usability initiative affects more and more components of the website. Could some programmer fix this? I don't have the first clue about how PHP works... (sorry for the long post, by the way)
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On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 10:57 AM, Casey Brown lists@caseybrown.org wrote:
Obviously, this would not be a problem with a speaker of British English, but it could potentially be a problem in all sorts of frameworks with someone who picked a language code like “arz”—Egyptian Arabic, which would predictably default to English even though a Standard Arabic version of the tutorial is available, which the average arz speaker would definitely be more familiar with!
The problem, therefore, is how MediaWiki handles dialects as separate languages, and if it’s not fixed now, it could be a much bigger problem as the usability initiative affects more and more components of the website. Could some programmer fix this? I don't have the first clue about how PHP works... (sorry for the long post, by the way)
Some of Chinese dialects are well-configured. See en.wp main page in za[1] as a good example (maybe this is the best example: za is used by a minority in China but they use Latin alphabets in za, so Chinese characters on that page are from zh translations as fallback. bo and ug are not configured in this way). wuu[2] can be another example.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?uselang=za [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?uselang=wuu
On 15 December 2010 04:57, Casey Brown lists@caseybrown.org wrote:
Hey Yannis,
The discussion list for the localization of the MediaWiki software is actually MediaWiki-i18n, so I've forwarded your e-mail to that list. I've also included Guillaume Paumier and Neil Kandalgaonkar on this e-mail, since they're the ones who made the Upload Wizard. :-)
Thanks for reporting the issues you encountered!
Casey
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Yannis A. yannanth@gmail.com Date: Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 7:08 PM Subject: [Translators-l] Dialects like "en-gb" on MediaWiki extensions To: translators-l@lists.wikimedia.org
For example, when I go over to the Upload Wizard for testing and casual uploading, there's a banner at the top telling me that the language was not found and that it “defaulted back to English”.
Obviously, this would not be a problem with a speaker of British English, but it could potentially be a problem in all sorts of frameworks with someone who picked a language code like “arz”—Egyptian Arabic, which would predictably default to English even though a Standard Arabic version of the tutorial is available, which the average arz speaker would definitely be more familiar with!
The problem, therefore, is how MediaWiki handles dialects as separate languages, and if it’s not fixed now, it could be a much bigger problem as the usability initiative affects more and more components of the website. Could some programmer fix this? I don't have the first clue about how PHP works... (sorry for the long post, by the way)
MediaWiki already handles this without problems, just that the criterion is actually different from being a dialect.
I assume that Upload Wizard is using mostly JavaScript, which needs its own localisation mechanism, which is not yet up to the same level as MediaWiki itself.
-Niklas
On 12/14/10 11:47 PM, Niklas Laxström wrote:
The problem, therefore, is how MediaWiki handles dialects as separate languages, and if it’s not fixed now, it could be a much bigger problem as the usability initiative affects more and more components of the website.
MediaWiki already handles this [...] I assume that Upload Wizard is using mostly JavaScript, which needs its own localisation mechanism, which is not yet up to the same level as MediaWiki itself.
Yes and no. It *used* to be all Javascript, which had the problems Niklas mentions. So I converted it to PHP, in the last few days we had before launch, relatively quickly.
If I recall correctly Guillaume Paumier pointed out the issue with the dialects and I said we'd get back to it later.
I was also uncertain what the performance effect would be of looking up multiple images via InstantCommons. I guess the mapping of a language to an available tutorial image needs to be cached.
If there are some people who want to fix it themselves, the file you want to modify is this one:
extensions/UploadWizard/UploadWizard.php
And the method is:
UploadWizardTutorial::getFile()
I added a bug here:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26342
Correction! UploadWizardTutorial.php.
On 12/15/10 3:05 AM, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
are some people who want to fix it themselves, the file you want to modify is this one:
extensions/UploadWizard/UploadWizard.php
And the method is:
UploadWizardTutorial::getFile()
I added a bug here:
mediawiki-i18n@lists.wikimedia.org