Hi List,
I'm from the Afrikaans Wikipedia and we inherited a translated MediaWiki (none of the original contributors have been active for over a year). The original choice of names for the talk pages (talk, user talk, and so on) are less than ideal as they are very long and cumbersome. Since then the languageAF.php file has not been maintained well and is in desperate need of attention. What would be the consequences of dropping in a new translation of languageAF.php that would involve renaming the namespaces?
(please CC me as I am not on the list)
Slim to none.
Note that you can also translate via the MediaWiki namespace. See [[Special:Allmessages]] (in en) for a list of such messages.
On 6/8/05, Alias viool@webmail.co.za wrote:
Hi List,
I'm from the Afrikaans Wikipedia and we inherited a translated MediaWiki (none of the original contributors have been active for over a year). The original choice of names for the talk pages (talk, user talk, and so on) are less than ideal as they are very long and cumbersome. Since then the languageAF.php file has not been maintained well and is in desperate need of attention. What would be the consequences of dropping in a new translation of languageAF.php that would involve renaming the namespaces?
(please CC me as I am not on the list)
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
On 08/06/05, Alias viool@webmail.co.za wrote:
What would be the consequences of dropping in a new translation of languageAF.php that would involve renaming the namespaces?
At present, there is no system for having more than 2 names for each namespace (the localized one, and a "canonical" English one) other than adding an ugly hack in the language file. So, while everything on the wiki would instantly show up with the new names, all existing links with the old names spelled out in them would instantly break.
e.g. if "Talk:" is currently translated "Foo:" and you change it to "Bar:" * a page called "Foo:Something" will now be called "Bar:Something" * links entered in other pages as "[[Foo:Something]]" will now point to a non-existent page, in the article namespace, called "Foo:Something"
If there's only a few such links, a bot could probably help fix them; if there are likely to be lots, you could add a hack in the LanguageAf.php, similar to the one for "Wikipedia:" in LanguageFr.php (see function getNsIndex()). But probably best in this case to keep two copies - one for use in existing Wikimedia projects, and one (without the hack) for distribution to other servers in the CVS.
In a future version, it looks like there may be a proper way of having aliases for namespaces (see http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-May/029909.html), but this may take some time to arrive.
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