On Wednesday 31 January 2007 12:38:38 Platonides wrote:
Localization is done by volunteers, sometimes with contradictory guidelines.
Hardcoded wikilinks inside message strings to pages not existing in vanilla Mediawiki are a clear DO NOT. This has to be rule number 1 for all translation teams and also has to be a strict rule for every svn-committer who checks in translations for others.
[[{{MediaWiki:grouppage-sysop}}|administrateur]] fixes it.
I' suggest this short syntax which is even used in some places: [[{{int:grouppage-sysop}}|administrateur]]
This solution fixes it for the strings linking to adiministrators. But what about the other hardcoded links in message strings? We would need to introcude some more mediawiki pages that declare these links.
I advocate for this consistent scheme: MediaWiki:$PAGE-url. This gets used already for url definition pages (but not everywhere).
These pages (not existing by default) get referenced hardcoded inside message strings from the MessagesEn.php file (I am not talking about the url pages like those called from mediawiki:sidebar): [[{{ns:project}}:Metadata]] [[{{ns:project}}:Administrators|administrator]] [[{{ns:help}}:Contents|help page]] [[{{ns:project}}:Searching|Searching {{SITENAME}}]] [[{{ns:project}}:Policy]]
Currently there are 151 language files in svn-mediawiki. No let's hope that other languages do not link even more pages. So 151*5 gives you 755 potential non-existant pages you'd need to care about.
Ok let's assume currently it is only one fourth of that number (cause of incomplete files and because of same names of pages in different languages). These would be still around 190 pages you'd need to make redirects in the wiki and whatnot in order to point people in every language always to the right place (or you touch all messages in language you weren't even aware of, that would be "some" more edits).
There are 10 ocurrences of [[Wikipedia:Administrators|administrator]] on [[en:Special:Allmessages]], all of them on customized messages.
The administrators are just one example. As well you didn't really consider the amount of interface languages (see above).
Be aware that when translators start using it and most references have been changed to this geeky code, some server admin will start complaining about slow rendering and undo all/invent a new way. ;)
I hardly can't believe that. I don't see how a {{int:PAGE-url}} could be more confusing than {{ns:project}}:PAGENAME. Quite the contrary.
And I can't really see how a {{ns:project}} can perform better than something using another replacement mechanism.
Arnomane