British English is a real issue. Personally, I think it's a bit silly to have it as a language option (Wikipedia has managed for ten years with an en-common approach!), but I can understand why people want to have it for the >0.5% of cases where en-gb might differ from en-us.
However... the current existence of a British English "internationalisation" actually breaks things for people who, in all good faith, select it. My comments from this time last year:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Requests_for_comment/Labels_and_descr...
It's the same in 2014. If you visit the site from the UK while not logged in, you get encouraged to "View Wikidata in British English" through the internationalisation header, despite the fact that this will make it less usable, less comprehensible, and generally less informative. There's no indication that this will screw things up, and no obvious way for an inexpert user to figure out how to fix it (by switching back to en-default)
If fallback languages aren't going to be available soon, then we really need to think - at the very least - about disabling this message.
Andrew.
On 4 May 2014 00:28, Joe Filceolaire filceolaire@gmail.com wrote:
Where are we with fallback languages?
I did a session for new editors with Magnus last weekend and one of the questions that came up was why one of the students couldn't see most of the labels - he had his language set to British English. He asked why there was no fallback to international English.
Joe
On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 8:34 PM, Jeroen De Dauw jeroendedauw@gmail.com wrote:
Hey,
Anything to add? Please share! :)
You forgot the part where we made big improvements to the DataModel component :)
I wrote a blog post about some of that http://www.bn2vs.com/blog/2014/04/30/wikibase-datamodel-entity-v2/
Cheers
-- Jeroen De Dauw - http://www.bn2vs.com Software craftsmanship advocate Evil software architect at Wikimedia Germany ~=[,,_,,]:3
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