It is now. The Language Prevention Committee (Langprevcom for short) won't allow you to have your new Wiki until you have a localised messages file. But then they probably won't allow it anyways for some other reason, and you will have to wait several billion years.
Mark
On 27/03/07, Titoxd@Wikimedia titoxd.wikimedia@gmail.com wrote:
I'm sorry, but all of this seems rather strange to me. First, the world is not going to explode if a wiki does not have a language file - the wiki will just return to the default language, English. You do not *need* a language file to customize the interface - that is what the MediaWiki namespace is for. You can begin customizing the interface gradually, see what you need, and do it at your own pace. If for some reason that I do not comprehend, that is unacceptable, then you can generate a language file from the customized wiki itself! Just go to Special:Allmessages, click on the "PHP" output format (for the English Wikipedia, this page would be http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Allmessages&ot=php ) and you have 80% of your language file right there. The rest is basic language information, such as whether you write left to right or right to left, and you can see it, for example, at the top of the Spanish language file at http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/languages/messages/Me ssagesEs.php?view=markup (for full, copious comments as to what these statements are, see the corresponding English file at http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/languages/messages/Me ssagesEn.php?view=markup ). After this, you can submit a bug to BugZilla. Adding a new internationalization file is usually a fairly trivial operation. What the developers won't do is internationalize the file for you - you need to provide them with the details. But again, this is *not* something that has to be done *before* the wiki is set up.
Titoxd.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l