If a sysop wished to supress a message is a wiki, say wikibooks, why not have a checkmark next to that message for each wiki, and any unchecked wiki will not use that message? That'd take care of a particular wiki wanting to utilize a particular message not used in the others.
So:
________________w_b_q_d | | | | | msg | lala|* * *| message "lala" gets used in all but wikibooks. | | | | -----------------------
James
-----Original Message----- From: wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org [mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Rowan Collins Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2005 2:48 AM To: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wiki system message commons?
On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 19:40:51 -0500, Stephen Forrest stephen.forrest@gmail.com wrote:
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.)
Unless I'm much mistaken, this is simply a case of no-one having created the LanguageAng.php file yet. Surely, once all the messages have been defined, you can *create* that file, and thus copy all the changes to new wikis. Or is there some reason that Anglo-Saxon has been denied its own translation file?
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).
That sounds like a question of co-ordination: there should be a master translation [in ang.wikipedia.org's MediaWiki namespace, perhaps] that is being regularly imported to all other wikis as it progresses [with appropriate scripts, bots, or whatever, to assist]. OK, so that's not as nice as having it central, but I hold to my argument that the MediaWiki namespace is for *customisation* not *translation*.
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.
No, that's not the way it works. Every message in the MediaWiki namespace represents a part of the interface, used by the software when displaying pages *on that particular wiki*. It allows users [with admin/sysop status] to change the text of these parts of the interface *to suit that particular wiki*, over-riding the standard-issue generic translation contained in LanguageXX.php.
For instance, MediaWiki:Currentevents and MediaWiki:Currentevents-url contain the label and location, respectively, of one of the links in the navigation box; they allow that link to be used for different purposes on different projects, or to be turned off completely. You can also add messages to the users of a particular wiki in appropriate places, such as MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning or MediaWiki:Sitesubtitle; but you can't just "introduce a new variable". Some of these customisations may be worth applying to all Wikimedia projects in a particular language, but many of them wouldn't be appropriate - or wouldn't be supported by the different communities. Thus, apart from making initial translations marginally easier to co-ordinate, centralising MediaWiki: namespaces would be a lot of develepor effort for a net loss of functionality.
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP] _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l