Hoi,
Because of some misunderstanding let me try to explain how the latest
method of localisation works.
History:
There used to be a situation that the localisation was done using a PHP
message file. This file needed to be updated when new messages came
about or when existing messages were changed. This happened because of
work done on the MediaWiki software. In practice this worked not that
well and there was also a need to have some messages changed to reflect
a policy or whatever that was specific to a project. Because of this the
messages exist. You can change and localise the messages in a project.
The challenge:
The bigger projects with the exception of the en.wikipedia have a lot of
messages adapted for its language. For people for whom the project
language is a foreign language, the PHP messages are used because it is
all the information that is available to help. When a new project
starts, it does not benefit from the localisation work done elsewhere.
When a message is changed, it needs to be fixed for that language in ALL
projects.
The work being done:
Nikerabbit and Gangleri have done absolutely great work by setting up a
wiki that is there to manage the localisation of MediaWiki. The result
of this project is that for many languages a proper localisation exists.
In the process of getting as far as we are, many issues with right to
left languages have been fixed both in the messages and in the core of
the MediaWiki software.. Many messages now make use of the Plural
construct; this allows for the correct phrasing of singular of plural
forms of text in the messages. The messages are platform agnostic; they
will however indicate the correct name of the project.
The current issue:
In order to make use of the standardised messages, it is important to
use the standard messages and not have project specific messages that
say the same thing. Deleting /these /messages ensure that when a message
is changed, it will be part of the next update of the software. For the
project specific messages, it is important that someone who maintains
these messages is subscribed to the mediawiki-i18n(a)mail.wikimedia.org
mailing list. This list is used to inform about the messages/issues that
are of interest with respect to internationalisation. Wikimedia uses the
MediaWiki messages in all its projects and in all the languages the
message Outside the WMF there are many, many more wikis that will
benefit from us doing a better job localising the software.
The challenge:
I have set myself the challenge to find more people to help with the
localisation for more languages. MediaWiki is great software is excels
because it has already been localised in so many languages. For those
languages where it did not yet happen, we find that the projects are not
doing that great. By finding interested people and organisations
MediaWiki will become more usable. It will become not only more usable
because it will become easier to start a project in languages like Akan
or Xhosa it will also become more easy to read projects like the
en.wikipedia as the user interface will no longer be a distraction.
The question:
What if any are the practical issues with this strategy. From my
perspective there are only winners. * Project specific messages are
unaffected * All other messages benefit from an effort designed to
provide a timely and improved service.
Thanks,
GerardM
