On 9/17/07, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
Simetrical wrote:
On 9/13/07, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
The problem with using the primary message system would be that where a local name isn't defined, it would fall back to the English name, which is not the desired behavior.
It would fall back to the fallback language's name for the language. Why isn't that desired behavior?
Because in this case, the fallback we'd want is the native language name, rather than yet another, third, unrelated language's name for it.
Say I'm using Hebrew, whose fallback is English. It's supposed to produce the word "German" in some appropriate language. Ideally, it should write "גרמנית", which is the Hebrew name for German. But say nobody's translated that. Then surely it should write "German", the English fallback name. Why would I want the fallback to be "Deutsch"? English was selected as the fallback precisely because Hebrew speakers are more liable to understand it than any other non-Hebrew language.
Of course, you could ask why you wouldn't want to display "Deutsch" to start with regardless of user language, as we do for interlanguage links. That's reasonable. But to display "גרמנית" as the first choice and anything but "German" as the second choice doesn't make any sense to me.