On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 00:17:15 +0000, Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote:
[snip]
I believe you have misunderstood the translation process, which I believe is roughly as follows [please don't take this as gospel and blame me if someone else tells you it's *not* like this]:
[snip]
I suspect that the idea behind James' question was to share MediaWiki system messages across Wikipedias in the same language. (This is because I happen to know that the Language*.php system is not used on the Anglo-Saxon wikipedia.)
For example, once we define on ang.wikipedia.org the value "Sibba hwierfunga" for the MediaWiki variable MediaWiki:Recentchangeslinked, it might be nice to automagically have the same customisation available to ang.wikibooks.org or ang.wikinews.org (if the latter existed). Since all the wikimedia wikis we're talking about are running MediaWiki, it is the same set of messages available for localization in every wiki.
I would argue that the MediaWiki messages are most useful if they are language-specific, not project-specific. If English Wikipedia and English Wikinews have need of different translations for the same MediaWiki variable, then this is evidence that one or both need to introduce another, project-specific MediaWiki variable for this specific purpose.
Steve