On 04/04/07, Jeff V. Merkey
<jmerkey(a)wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
Mark Williamson wrote:
They *are* the ones doing this. The discussion
here is about
restrictions being placed on these people.
What we *are* discussing is whether or not these people should be
burdened with translating LanguageBat-ltg.php before they even get
their own Wikipedia. Nothing more, nothing less.
Completing a language file is reasonable and must be done. Period.
There are XML dumps and other
logostics reasons why this makes sense.
Nobody in the past was required to do it _before_ they could start a
Wikipedia. I'm not sure why we need that requirement now. It's
certainly possible to extract the messages from
http://###.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Allmessages&ot=php
post ipso facto. Translating the messages via the MediaWiki namespace
is certainly a lot less 'technical' and is going to be a lot easier
with little technical experience to do.
I remember when a user wanted to translate the LanguageXX.php into
Breton, I had to walk him through certain parts (for example, the
Breton language uses an apostrophe as part of a trigraph, c'h, and you
have to type c/'h or it will think that's the end of the message).
I'm having a hard time trying to understand this one as well. Certainly
any such translation that already exists (for example, creating a new
Wikibooks/Wikisource/etc. when a Wikipedia in that language already
exists) perhaps ought to be carried over, but why would it be so much
harder to simply open a new Wikipedia in a given target language and
encourage early supporters and community members to simply make the
appropriate changes to the MediaWiki namespace? This sounds like a
technical problem that is forcing people into doing things to suit the
technology than trying to be amiable to people who very likely are not
technically inclined.
-- Robert Horning