On Mon, May 05, 2014 at 12:13:48PM -0700, Erik Moeller wrote:
Quick gut feel answer - IMO it should be localized in local, monolingual project invocations of media viewer (dewiki, frwiki, etc.) and canonical on multilingual wikis (Meta, Commons). If you're in dewiki and frwiki and copy wikitext, you'll most likely want to use it on that wiki, and the common expectation is to use the localized namespace prefix. If you're doing cross-wiki work, you can either go to Commons or adapt the namespace prefix. Optimize for the common case.
There's a problem: How do we know where the multi-lingual wikis are?
Commons siteinfo [0] returns lang="en" which would give us the "right" result technically, but not for the right reasons (which is a red flag to me, especially when a likely answer is "special-case Commons", which Erik should know I hate doing)
Using English in the wikitext may make things slightly more confusing for some users, but it will make it way less confusing for anyone doing cross-wiki work. Not being able to recognize the string "File:" as an image transclusion is bad, but your image transclusion not working at all is even worse.
In the Mystical Future, VE will handle it all transparently anyway. Let's just make it *work*, then let VE make it easier on editors.
[0] http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&m...