Am 28.07.2016 um 12:26 schrieb Lydia Pintscher:
The discussion about how to do this is happening in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T86528 The basic problem is that we do use items for the units. I think this is the right thing to do but it does make this particular part a bit tricky.
Well, I think we could sidestep the grammar issue by using unit symbols. We would have to get them from statements, and they would have to be multilingual values (or mutliple mono-lingual values), but that is still much less complicated than trying to apply plural rules.
An alternative is to use MediaWiki i18n messages instead of entity labels. E.g. if the unit is Q11573, we could check if MediaWiki:wikibase-unit-Q11573 exists, and if it does, use it. We'd get internationalization including support for plurals for free.
We could actually combine all of these approaches: first check for a system message, then check for a symbol statement, then use the label, and if all fails, use the ID.
I'll comment on the ticket.