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]
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
Rowan Collins wrote:
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?
LanguageXx.php files are complicated, hard to create and hard to update. Every language file has to be carefully checked by a developer for security flaws, and 9 times out of 10 there are PHP syntax errors. They also require much developer attention to commit to CVS and to put on to the live server. You can be sure that any proposal to reduce the need to use them will get my attention.
It was my hope that the MediaWiki namespace would largely do away with the need to create language files, however that need remained and recent developments (the growth in multi-language projects and the ability for users to select the interface language) have exacerbated our dependence on them.
-- Tim Starling
--- Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
It was my hope that the MediaWiki namespace would largely do away with the need to create language files, however that need remained and recent developments (the growth in multi-language projects and the ability for users to select the interface language) have exacerbated our dependence on them.
Why not have a bunch of subpages off each MediaWiki message page? One subpage per language. Default values would work as they do now.
-- mav
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
On Jan 11, 2005, at 6:51 PM, Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
It was my hope that the MediaWiki namespace would largely do away with the need to create language files, however that need remained and recent developments (the growth in multi-language projects and the ability for users to select the interface language) have exacerbated our dependence on them.
Why not have a bunch of subpages off each MediaWiki message page? One subpage per language. Default values would work as they do now.
I'm fairly certain it already works this way, so you can customize messages in each language on a given wiki if desired. The more general issue, though, is updating those defaults.
When we basically only had one Wikipedia wiki per language, editing the messages in that wiki was generally sufficient, but now we have several wikis per language and _any_ of our wikis may be optionally displayed in _any_ language.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 18:58:12 -0800, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
On Jan 11, 2005, at 6:51 PM, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Why not have a bunch of subpages off each MediaWiki message page? One subpage per language. Default values would work as they do now.
I'm fairly certain it already works this way, so you can customize messages in each language on a given wiki if desired.
Wow! I have tried that (locally, of course) and it works! (e.g. MediaWiki:Something/en) But, obviously, the basic idea of someone manually copying some 1000 messages of a single translation to hundreds of Wikimedia sites (not to mention he/she would need sysop privileges on all wikis to do that) is useless.
When we basically only had one Wikipedia wiki per language, editing the messages in that wiki was generally sufficient, but now we have several wikis per language and _any_ of our wikis may be optionally displayed in _any_ language.
A problem that is not mentioned is also that the translations of MediaWiki should be included in its distribution, so that someone who installs MediaWiki should not get messages suitable for some two years old version (if he gets anything at all).
I think the problem is that translators have to be able to write (correct) PHP code and the file is security-sensitive. If we would split the LanguageXx files to the low-level part (implementation of the respective Language subclass) and the high-level part (plain message catalog), the latter could be implemented in some other way than direct PHP code, e.g. using GNU gettext. I have no idea what the performance would be, but it would be much easier for anyone to publish updated translation, and the developers would not need to do detailed analysis of the code. (There are probably be _some_ security-sensitive items in the current version, but hopefully not many, and even those could be (I believe) solved in future versions of MW.)
-- [[ cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec ]]
Petr Kadlec wrote:
On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 18:58:12 -0800, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
On Jan 11, 2005, at 6:51 PM, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Why not have a bunch of subpages off each MediaWiki message page? One subpage per language. Default values would work as they do now.
I'm fairly certain it already works this way, so you can customize messages in each language on a given wiki if desired.
Wow! I have tried that (locally, of course) and it works! (e.g. MediaWiki:Something/en) But, obviously, the basic idea of someone manually copying some 1000 messages of a single translation to hundreds of Wikimedia sites (not to mention he/she would need sysop privileges on all wikis to do that) is useless.
A more sensible way would be in having a bot look at differences between system messages and the content of the PHP file. Some changes can be done automagically eg where a message says: "Wikipedia" it can be changes to SYSTEMNAME (or whatever the standard name is for the application). As far as I know, there is someone looking into this. Obviously there are several things that are to do with local policies like provide a link to enable a one click creation of a new article etc. These are the pitfalls of moving stuff back to the PHP file.
Thanks, GerardM
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