I’m not sure if this is the right place to write about this, but there’s
something of the problem with the language detection (sorry, I don’t know
the technical terms) module of several *MediaWiki* extensions and templates,
such as the newly-released *Wikimedia Commons Upload Wizard* and... many
templates!
For example, when I go over to the Upload Wizard for testing and casual
uploading, there's a banner at the top telling me that the language was not
found and that it “defaulted back to English”.
Obviously, this would not be a problem with a speaker of *British English*,
but it could potentially be a problem in all sorts of frameworks with
someone who picked a language code like “*arz*”—*Egyptian Arabic*, which
would predictably default to English even though a *Standard Arabic* version
of the tutorial is available, which the average *arz* speaker would
definitely be more familiar with!
The problem, therefore, is how MediaWiki handles dialects as separate
languages, and if it’s not fixed now, it could be a much bigger problem as
the usability initiative affects more and more components of the website.
Could some programmer fix this? I don't have the first clue about how PHP
works...
(sorry for the long post, by the way)