On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 1:30 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
The system may work fine on Meta... That is fine for Meta. I am interested in seeing it work on other wikis where it does not work.
This part is, I think, the most important selling point of the extension, and one which has not been given proper emphasis. We're not just talking about meta or en.wikipedia, although I'm sure many people have trouble thinking beyond a handful of the largest or most prominent wikis. We have hundreds of individual projects, all of which could benefit from the standardization that this extension brings. With SUL a reality now, people have been demonstratively more willing to move cross-project and explore new projects. Our users should be able to express their language proficiencies and find language-specific help on any project that they visit.
If we want to have a unified system for expressing a user's language proficiencies, we need more then a thousand templates on one wiki. People have better things to do then worry about copying, importing, or recreating thousands of templates. Even creating a small number of parameterized templates isn't helpful, because users aren't going to be familiar with the parameters to these templates on every wiki. It simplifies the implementation, certainly, but it does nothing to improve standardization or inter-project unity.
I am in favor of the concept behind this extension. I have not had much experience with it's implementation, however.
--Andrew Whitworth