On Mon, 1 Nov 2004 17:21:29 -0700, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:

For month names, day names, and the like, AFAIK that is indeed your only option.

On Mon, 1 Nov 2004 22:48:32 +0100, James R. Johnson modean52@comcast.net wrote:

...

Hello,

        I was recently asked on the Anglo-Saxon wiki if we could put the

day and month names into Anglo-Saxon, but the only way I know of to do this is through the LanguageAng.php file.is there another way, or do I have to have that file installed by someone?

If this is the case, then as another contributor to the Anglo-Saxon wikipedia I would add my voice to that of James to request this customisation file be installed.

I understand this requires the resources of a volunteer developer. While I realize that the creation of ang.wikipedia.org generated some controversy, as Old English is a dead language, I have been quite impressed with the its growth since James announced its existence on the Forum for Composition in Old English mailing list: over the last month we've written 113 articles, on a variety of subjects, largely ones outside the historical Anglo-Saxon world. There are 20 users, with perhaps 4-5 highly active ones.

If this customisation isn't regarded as being worthy of developer resources, I would tentatively be willing to attempt it myself, as I'm quite familiar with CVS, PHP, and a UNIX shell environment. (I say 'tentatively' because I'm not sure how much of my time would be required in learning the system and/or proving I'm sufficiently trustworthy and competent to be given developer priveleges).

Thanks,

Steve

Petr Kadlec wrote:

I think I'll throw my $0.02 in. I regard this as quite an annoying problem. The facts that

• every LanguageXx update requires a developer's action
• developers are generally very busy
• we have no developer on cs:

mean that "our" LanguageCs.php file in CVS is really outdated. I try to regularly update/correct LanguageCs.php on meta, but this has no effect (and [[meta:Requests for languageXX.php update]] is marked as deprecated).

So I was thinking -- would it be possible to give a person some kind of "language-maintainer", ("limited-developer") privileges? All that would be required is write-access to the language subdirectories in CVS and the language-specific wiki(es) or even only to the specific LanguageXx.php and maybe some kind of possibility to reinitialize the MediaWiki namespace (maybe through a little bit tweaked rebuildMessages.php).

Any ideas, opinions, ...?

The answer is automation. We need to get rid of language files altogether except for the few bits of custom coding such as CJK character splitting. There's no such thing as a limited developer, we either give them the keys to the house or we don't. We'd have to write a script to allow upload of language files through a safe interface, but I think programming time would be better spent moving everything into special pages and the MediaWiki namespace, as we have been doing.

-- Tim Starling

I think something similar has occurred on the Anglo-Saxon wiki. Sometimes while editing a page, I'll find the interface is completely modern English, without the changes I've already made, and sometimes it's normal.

James

-----Original Message----- From: wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org [mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Petr Kadlec Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2004 2:10 PM To: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Day and month names

[...] moving everything into special pages and the MediaWiki namespace, as we have been doing.

Sure, but three points here: * People who downloads MediaWiki right now cannot use Czech for the interface, as their LanguageCs.php is just plain terrible. * As a special case, this is also true about other Wikimedia projects, e.g. Wiktionary. If you take a look at cs:Wiktionary: you can see English messages mixed with (bad) Czech. * Recently, we have repeatedly experienced switching between MediaWiki-based and LanguageCs.php-based messages on cs: Wikipedia. The LanguageCs.php-based messages are really terrible to look at.

[[cs:User:Mormegil|Petr Kadlec]] _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Petr Kadlec wrote:

...

[...] moving everything into special pages and the MediaWiki namespace, as we have been doing.

Sure, but three points here:

• People who downloads MediaWiki right now cannot use Czech for the

interface, as their LanguageCs.php is just plain terrible.

• As a special case, this is also true about other Wikimedia projects,

e.g. Wiktionary. If you take a look at cs:Wiktionary: you can see English messages mixed with (bad) Czech.

• Recently, we have repeatedly experienced switching between

MediaWiki-based and LanguageCs.php-based messages on cs: Wikipedia. The LanguageCs.php-based messages are really terrible to look at.

That's why I've written a script to dump messages from the MediaWiki namespace into a file, and a script to import such files into new MediaWiki namespaces.

-- Tim Starling

On Tue, 02 Nov 2004 10:54:58 +0100, Ashar Voultoiz hashar@altern.org wrote:

Translations are added by developpers, they can't be customized.

Here is the list of data that need to be translated (I am not sure what are the "-gen" ending strings for):

The appropriate translations for these already exist in http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LanguageAng.php. (However, they're in a PHP array $wgAllMessagesAng, rather than the more specific arrays like $wgWeekdayNamesAng; I'm not sure if that's significant.)

However, not all of LanguageAng.php is translated, and what isn't is in German, so I wouldn't like to see that go live exactly as is now.

Steve