On Fri, 15 Aug 2014, at 00:52, Niklas Laxström wrote:
Translate extension has supported for a long time
having any language
as the source language. There just has not been an interface in
MediaWiki to set the source language of a page.
The good news is that Kunal Grover, a GSoC student has created
Special:PageLanguage to do just that. [1] I expect it will be
available quite soon.
[...]
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Kunalgrover05/Progress_Report
On Fri, 15 Aug 2014, at 01:50, Philippe Verdy wrote:
This is good development, but I don't see why we
need a special page to
define what is metadata of the page itself.
[...]
Yes, I have same question.
On Fri, 15 Aug 2014, at 01:50, Philippe Verdy wrote:
May be it will be accessible
from the VisualEditor; like we edit categories, but such metadata is a
general need for lots of other applications. The general need would be to
be able to associate metadata with a symbolic type to any page: just a few
metadata is currently handled in MediaWiki: categories, default
sortkeys, interwiki links, plus a few other flags inserted by using magic
words (like __NOINDEX__).
There are also external metadata stored in Wikidata for some wiki projects.
More are needed (e.g. for different typing sort keys).
Any way I expect to see soon a reliable way to detect the page language
including for translated pages; but more importantly for sources of
translations without having to assume they are in English, or create thme
in another language and creating a pseudo-translation to the original
language by copying keys, then modifying the English source again but
keeping the original text.
At least, when we mark a new page for translation, we should immediately
have an option asking in which language is the source; if it's not specifid
by the new experimental Special:PageLanguage page (which is not necessarily
needed).
And once a source page has been marked for translation, the Translate tool
should have a simple API to query its language or the language used in the
generated translations, And ideally, we should be able to swithc from one
source language to another (for example some projects start in English, but
are later managed in German or Chinese, or a local Chapter initially
creates documents in its own local language such as French, Hindi or
Spanish, and will not use English as the reference (this is important for
pages reporting local projects mostly done in other languages, outside
countries or regions with a majority of native English-speakers, i.e: most
countries of the world, including Europe (and even North America where
French and Spanish are very present too ; Spanish and Chinese are also
growing fast in US, and here there are aslo local communities that would
like to promote their own local projects in their native non-English tongue
: do you remember that US does not have any "official" language ?).
Kunal Grover, could you please fill in about that?
svetlana