Hi,
I now have fixed the internal links in MessagesEn.php and all message files from A to C (except MessagesAr.php which will follow later, blame my text editor's rtl bugs). See http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8846 for patch files (all applied to SVN) and http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/languages/messages/?s....
Basically I did replace things like "blabla see [[Project:help|help]]" with "blabla see [[{{MediaWiki:helppage}}]]" (among other things like localised namespace names and custom links, see below). See previous mails for the detailed reasons.
However "{{MediaWiki:" is only temporary syntax as in multilingual wikis people would also like to get linked to localised project pages in case they exist. With my current patch this is possible if people customize the messages for that language locally in their wiki. In order to reduce the need for such customization we need a new special template token (maybe called "{{link:") that would need to work the following way (I explain it with the example of MediaWiki:helppage):
Embedd MediaWiki:helppage/your_language -> if not existing in the wiki database: embedd MediaWiki:helppage -> if not existing in the wiki database embedd 'helppage' from MessagesEn.php.
This would cause the following: Certain localised links can be activated by local admins with one single MediaWiki namespace edit individually for each language. This would be probably the best solution between "link hell into nowhere" and "default language only links".
This approach is closely related to the solution idea of another link bug (interface URLs resolution order (splitted from "Major flaws...")):
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2007-January/thread.html#292... http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2007-February/029335.html
So far to the reasons of my changes. My fix also means standardisation as the same page links only need to be defined in one place.
Furthermore there is now a narrow set of link defining pages which is allowed to be used in standard system messages (no custom link calls anylonger!):
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Configuration_settings#Page_customizati...
+ the new "MediaWiki:policy-url" link definition page. See also current MessagesEn.php in SVN.
So my work resulted in these style guidelines for translations:
1) Do not use local namespace names in standard message strings. The same applies for localised wiki markup (like translations of "thumb" and such). Especially something like "Benutzerseite von [[Benutzer:$1|$1]]" (German "user page of ...") instead of "Benutzerseite von [[User:$1|$1]]" is dangerous as the link does not work in wikis with a different name for user namespace (basically all wikis with a default language other than German, canonical namespace links get translated to localised, use {{ns:user}} and such when not using alternative link text or text outside links).
2) Do not link article namespace images or or other local content. Something like "Your [[IP adress]] has been blocked..." is wrong. It has to be "Your IP adress has been blocked...". No other wiki than Wikipedia or a wiki on networking will usually have an article about IP adresses.
3) No Cross-wiki/interwiki links. Especially links like "[[w:en:IP adress]]" are not allowed as well as interwiki link definitions into Wikimedia wikis are removed in default MediaWiki.
4) Do not directly link any project pages in messages. Use only the link definitions such as {{MediaWiki:helppage}}. Do not create new link definitions in your local MessagesXX.php file.
As you probably can imagine, fixing all 151 message files takes quite a while and thatfor I call for your help. As well I wasn't able to fix every link (tagged with '# problem with link' in message files). So please retranslate them now from the English original using the new link guidelines.
I will post a detailed list of affected message strings that need retranslation on mediawiki-i18n-l http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n in the next hours and hope there for coordination of the remaining message file fixes.
Have fun, Arnomane