Hello, Please compare http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Userlogin&uselan… to http://he.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Userlogin&uselang=he&… On Commons, the messages appear RTL text direction which is correct, but on the left, which I imagine is as unnatural as right-aligning for English. Evidently there is some sitewide setting for he.wp that tells it to display messages right aligned. Commons default language is English which is left aligned. I guess that using uselang=he is not enough for it to display messages right aligned? Should we (Commons) go and insert <span align="right"> around every /he message? Would this solve it? (Would this be a *good way* to solve it?) thanks, Brianna user:pfctdayelise

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Brianna Laugher wrote: First, not all the messages can use HTML, and even Wikitext, so this may fail. Second, several messages don't need this. Third, this won't fix the interface as the whole page is LTR-aligned. Fourth, the problem is not "align" but "direction": direction means the general direction of the paragraph, and the default align if not set. If you just set <span align="right">, this will make the points (".") appear in the right instead of the left. It should be <span dir="rtl">, but this won't work either, from the above reasons. Actually, *there is* a setting of direction: the variable $rtl in the messages file. If it is set to true, the wiki is RTL; if not, the wiki is LTR. This works very good in RTL wikis. RTL languages set "$rtl = true", and LTR languages set "$rtl = false" (or let it fall back to the English default, which is false). "$rtl" is read *from the content language files*, i.e. the default language of the site. Since the default language of Commons is English, the setting is LTR. This is good for most pages, because it also sets the directions of pages. If the interface language (the user-selected language) direction is different than the content language (the site default language) direction, *the content language direction is used* for everything. This can and should be changed - the interface direction should be used for the interface, and Bug 6100 ( http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6100 ) is about it. This has nothing to do with Multilingual MediaWiki.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Gerard Meijssen wrote: It is indeed (though partially - http://mw.visc.us/Main_Page?uselang=he works but http://mw.visc.us/ara:Main_Page?uselang=en doesn't), but fixing this bug doesn't require using Multilingual MediaWiki, as it's also useful in single-language wikis for people who use RTL wikis but prefer to use an LTR language, and for people who use LTR wikis but prefer to use an RTL language.