[apologies for the double-post, forgot to add a subject line the first time!]

[cross-posted to mediawiki-i18n, languages@ and language committee mailing lists. let me know if there's a better list to use for LanguageConverter users.]

We're about ready to deploy initial support for LanguageConverter to Parsoid and Visual Editor (see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T43716 and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T49411 for background).

A naming issue has come up. In https://www.mediawiki.org/ wiki/Writing_systems/Syntax there are two categories of rules: "bidirectional" and "unidirectional".

First, before I ask more: if you are a user of LanguageConverter on your home wiki, did you know that there was more than one type of rule? And if so, do you call them "bidirectional"/"unidirectional" or something else?

These names appear in the HTML DOM emitted by Parsoid (see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Specs/HTML/1.5.0#Language_conversion_blocks). There was concern that "bidir" as a field name would be confusing; in particular that people would confuse this with RTL/LTR issues or the Unicode "bidi" algorithm; neither of which are related at all.

As a user of LanguageConverter, do you find this naming confusing? If Visual Editor described these types of rules with a different name (say, "symmetric"/"asymmetric") would that be a help or harm or neither?

The history of the "bidirectional" name in the PHP code appears to date back to 2008 as far as I can tell ( https://github.com/wikimedia/ mediawiki/commit/69dbeb97f15b65dd5773852d76c3bc93caefc862 ) but they haven't been strongly exposed in the UI AFAIK. Perhaps they are present in the UI for the noteTA gadget ( https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/ MediaWiki:Gadget-noteTA.js )?

At any rate, I'm be interested in any thoughts or comments from folks who use LanguageConverter regularly. --scott