Hi,
hopefully this notice will prevent complaints about this change.
Someone just checked in a software change that will allow sysops to customise the names of months and weekdays via pages in the MediaWiki namespace, just like most other things in the user interface. When this change goes live on the site, you will see the month and weekdays names change into English (I believe). Please do not panic when that happens.
Please create pages called [[MediaWiki:January]] etc. and [[MediaWiki:Sunday]] etc. in your local Wikipedia and translate the months/weekdays names appropriately.
In case you're not sure about the correct spellings, I have included them below.
Greetings, Timwi
Weekday names: [[MediaWiki:Sunday]] [[MediaWiki:Monday]] [[MediaWiki:Tuesday]] [[MediaWiki:Wednesday]] [[MediaWiki:Thursday]] [[MediaWiki:Friday]] [[MediaWiki:Saturday]]
Month names: [[MediaWiki:January]] [[MediaWiki:February]] [[MediaWiki:March]] [[MediaWiki:April]] [[MediaWiki:May]] [[MediaWiki:June]] [[MediaWiki:July]] [[MediaWiki:August]] [[MediaWiki:September]] [[MediaWiki:October]] [[MediaWiki:November]] [[MediaWiki:December]]
Abbreviated month names: [[MediaWiki:Jan]] [[MediaWiki:Feb]] [[MediaWiki:Mar]] [[MediaWiki:Apr]] [[MediaWiki:May]] [[MediaWiki:Jun]] [[MediaWiki:Jul]] [[MediaWiki:Aug]] [[MediaWiki:Sep]] [[MediaWiki:Oct]] [[MediaWiki:Nov]] [[MediaWiki:Dec]]
On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 17:41:10 +0100 Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
In case you're not sure about the correct spellings, I have included them below.
Month names:
(snip)
[[MediaWiki:May]]
(snip)
Abbreviated month names:
(snip)
[[MediaWiki:May]]
(snip)
I think you'd better find something else for one of those two...
Andre Engels
Andre Engels wrote:
Month names: [[MediaWiki:May]] Abbreviated month names: [[MediaWiki:May]]
I think you'd better find something else for one of those two...
The long name is now called [[MediaWiki:May_long]].
Again, thanks for pointing this out!
Timwi
Timwi wrote:
Hi,
hopefully this notice will prevent complaints about this change.
Someone just checked in a software change that will allow sysops to customise the names of months and weekdays via pages in the MediaWiki namespace, just like most other things in the user interface. When this change goes live on the site, you will see the month and weekdays names change into English (I believe). Please do not panic when that happens.
I think you're jumping the gun a bit here. We're currently branched with experimental code in HEAD. Unless someone backports this to REL1_3, it'll be weeks before it goes live.
-- Tim Starling
Believe it or not, I think this could be the type of messages which would gain to be announced on wikipedia itself.
Just as a general message, send through an automated system, JUST when the change is made.
(ant running away)
Timwi wrote:
Hi,
hopefully this notice will prevent complaints about this change.
Someone just checked in a software change that will allow sysops to customise the names of months and weekdays via pages in the MediaWiki namespace, just like most other things in the user interface. When this change goes live on the site, you will see the month and weekdays names change into English (I believe). Please do not panic when that happens.
Please create pages called [[MediaWiki:January]] etc. and [[MediaWiki:Sunday]] etc. in your local Wikipedia and translate the months/weekdays names appropriately.
In case you're not sure about the correct spellings, I have included them below.
Greetings, Timwi
Weekday names: [[MediaWiki:Sunday]] [[MediaWiki:Monday]] [[MediaWiki:Tuesday]] [[MediaWiki:Wednesday]] [[MediaWiki:Thursday]] [[MediaWiki:Friday]] [[MediaWiki:Saturday]]
Month names: [[MediaWiki:January]] [[MediaWiki:February]] [[MediaWiki:March]] [[MediaWiki:April]] [[MediaWiki:May]] [[MediaWiki:June]] [[MediaWiki:July]] [[MediaWiki:August]] [[MediaWiki:September]] [[MediaWiki:October]] [[MediaWiki:November]] [[MediaWiki:December]]
Abbreviated month names: [[MediaWiki:Jan]] [[MediaWiki:Feb]] [[MediaWiki:Mar]] [[MediaWiki:Apr]] [[MediaWiki:May]] [[MediaWiki:Jun]] [[MediaWiki:Jul]] [[MediaWiki:Aug]] [[MediaWiki:Sep]] [[MediaWiki:Oct]] [[MediaWiki:Nov]] [[MediaWiki:Dec]]
In message cdbks0$qar$1@sea.gmane.org, Timwi timwi@gmx.net writes
Someone just checked in a software change that will allow sysops to customise the names of months and weekdays via pages in the MediaWiki namespace, just like most other things in the user interface. When this change goes live on the site, you will see the month and weekdays names change into English (I believe). Please do not panic when that happens.
Please create pages called [[MediaWiki:January]] etc. and [[MediaWiki:Sunday]] etc. in your local Wikipedia and translate the months/weekdays names appropriately.
Will it screw things up if we create these in advance of your software change?
While I'm on the subject of local language versions, I posted a query to Wikitech-l last week about who, if anyone, monitors and applies requested changes to the LanguageXX.php files, requested via [[meta:Requests for languageXX.php update]] and [[meta:Language files to be updated]] and got no reply at all --- there are requests on there that go back to last March and there is no indication that any of them have been actioned.
It's frustrating to those of us who are trying to keep our user interfaces and magic words reasonably grammatical to go to the trouble of updating these huge files and then we find that the developers have gone and released another version of their own, which we then have to keep our files in synchronisation with.
On Sat, Jul 17, 2004 at 09:34:42PM +0100, Arwel Parry wrote:
In message cdbks0$qar$1@sea.gmane.org, Timwi timwi@gmx.net writes
Someone just checked in a software change that will allow sysops to customise the names of months and weekdays via pages in the MediaWiki namespace, just like most other things in the user interface. When this change goes live on the site, you will see the month and weekdays names change into English (I believe). Please do not panic when that happens.
Please create pages called [[MediaWiki:January]] etc. and [[MediaWiki:Sunday]] etc. in your local Wikipedia and translate the months/weekdays names appropriately.
Will it screw things up if we create these in advance of your software change?
Probably not, but there is no need in creating them in advance as they are automatically taken from the current translation.
While I'm on the subject of local language versions, I posted a query to Wikitech-l last week about who, if anyone, monitors and applies requested changes to the LanguageXX.php files, requested via [[meta:Requests for languageXX.php update]] and [[meta:Language files to be updated]] and got no reply at all --- there are requests on there that go back to last March and there is no indication that any of them have been actioned.
[[meta:Requests for languageXX.php update]] is rather dead, it is from the time before users were able to customize messages using MediaWiki:...
Regards,
JeLuF
In message 20040718050009.GB29414@jeluf.mine.nu, Jens Frank JeLuF-Mmb7MZpHnFY@public.gmane.org writes
On Sat, Jul 17, 2004 at 09:34:42PM +0100, Arwel Parry wrote:
While I'm on the subject of local language versions, I posted a query to Wikitech-l last week about who, if anyone, monitors and applies requested changes to the LanguageXX.php files, requested via [[meta:Requests for languageXX.php update]] and [[meta:Language files to be updated]] and got no reply at all --- there are requests on there that go back to last March and there is no indication that any of them have been actioned.
[[meta:Requests for languageXX.php update]] is rather dead, it is from the time before users were able to customize messages using MediaWiki:...
In that case it's a rather unfortunate that there's quite a prominent link to it from "meta utilities" on meta's front page! But notwithstanding MediaWiki, there are other things which individual language users may wish to customise, such as magic words, words for "left" "right" "centre" "thumb" etc. for the image syntax, namespace names, etc., which are among the things I've been trying to update on cy. There is still a need for user communities to be able to attract the attention of developers.
Arwel Parry wrote:
In that case it's a rather unfortunate that there's quite a prominent link to it from "meta utilities" on meta's front page! But notwithstanding MediaWiki, there are other things which individual language users may wish to customise, such as magic words, words for "left" "right" "centre" "thumb" etc. for the image syntax, namespace names, etc., which are among the things I've been trying to update on cy. There is still a need for user communities to be able to attract the attention of developers.
I have to agree. There's also a request for the Minnan language file to be uploaded (for the first time, so this is more than a correction of spelling or some other small refinement). I understand well-established Wikipedias are generally past the point of needing to upload these files. And I understand developers have much more interesting ideas to work on (say, making the hardcoded messages customizable in MediaWiki namespace?) than doing this scut work. But something needs to be done so that localization efforts on smaller Wikipedias can climb out this apparent limbo.
Having said that, I appreciate and really look forward to, having more strings accessible via the namespace.
~~~~
On Sat, Jul 17, 2004 at 05:41:10PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
Hi,
hopefully this notice will prevent complaints about this change.
Someone just checked in a software change that will allow sysops to customise the names of months and weekdays via pages in the MediaWiki namespace, just like most other things in the user interface. When this change goes live on the site, you will see the month and weekdays names change into English (I believe). Please do not panic when that happens.
Please create pages called [[MediaWiki:January]] etc. and [[MediaWiki:Sunday]] etc. in your local Wikipedia and translate the months/weekdays names appropriately.
Why would anybody want to change month or week names to something different ?
This interface isn't powerful enough for creating new translations, and it will break some of those that work now as it doesn't provide separate nominative and genitive monthnames, like the current software does.
On Sat, Jul 17, 2004 at 05:41:10PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
Hi,
hopefully this notice will prevent complaints about this change.
Someone just checked in a software change that will allow sysops to customise the names of months and weekdays via pages in the MediaWiki namespace, just like most other things in the user interface. When this change goes live on the site, you will see the month and weekdays names change into English (I believe). Please do not panic when that happens.
Please create pages called [[MediaWiki:January]] etc. and [[MediaWiki:Sunday]] etc. in your local Wikipedia and translate the months/weekdays names appropriately.
If you would have read the entire patch, you would have noticed that I'm moving translations from hardcoded to user-configurable, not only for English, but for all languages. There have been complaints that certain parts of the user interface are not maintainable (month names, user preferences, etc) using the MediaWiki:-namespace.
I'm putting a high effort into not breaking things in this process, e.g. moving all existing translations etc. Currently having 52 languages, this will take some time.
If you fear that code changes will break things, please contact the author of that patch (in this case: me) first, before frightening all our users! Be assured that the goal of the MediaWiki developers is not to break things.
JeLuF
Jens Frank wrote:
If you would have read the entire patch, you would have noticed that I'm moving translations from hardcoded to user-configurable, not only for English, but for all languages.
At the time I had written this, it was only for English, German, French and Chinese. I was also under the false impression that the code would go live relatively quickly, and I wasn't sure if you (or anyone) would do the remaining languages. Given this, please accept my claim that I was acting in good faith when warning users.
There have been complaints that certain parts of the user interface are not maintainable (month names, user preferences, etc) using the MediaWiki:-namespace.
You seem to think that I was somehow opposed to the change you made to the code? What makes you think that?
I'm putting a high effort into not breaking things in this process, e.g. moving all existing translations etc. Currently having 52 languages, this will take some time.
Thanks for doing it. I appreciate it.
Be assured that the goal of the MediaWiki developers is not to break things.
Be similarly assured that the goal of my message was not to "frighten users". :-p
Greetings, Timwi
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