Gilles Dubuc, 06/05/2014 09:33:
Why doesn't the step where we save wikitext entered by someone on an article automatically substitute "File:" for the localized version upon save?
That would be called a pre-save transform.
Given my limited experience of editing articles, if I was entering things manually and writing "File:" (or the equivalent in a language I speak) [...] It should just magically work.
It does work: canonical and content language are both perfectly valid wikitext. Some wikis may have different preferences on what version to use and normalise the wikitext via bots if they care a lot, but I've never heard of someone so crazy as to blame users using aliases.
Of course that would change if suddenly people were allowed to use a random language among 300 in wikitext. In that case you can expect guidelines would pop up everywhere restricting which languages you're actually expected to use.
Nemo