On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 8:31 PM, Yuri Astrakhan <yuriastrakhan(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I know Mediawiki has language fallbacks, but they are
very simple (e.g. for
"ru", if "ru" is not there, try "en").
Russian is a major world language, so there isn't really anywhere else to
go. The fallbacks specified on the Localisation statistics page (
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Localisation_statistics ) are useful for
choosing which world language or supra-regional language to fall back to
when you don't have info in a given language.
It doesn't address a lot of your harder questions of what to do when world
languages collide, or when politics gets involved.
When viewing a map of China in English, should Chinese (local) name be
shown together with the English name? Should it be
shown for all types of
features (city name, street name, name of the church, ...?)
As a maps user, I'd like both the local name and the name in my language on
any feature where that's possible (though not both if they are identical,
as with "Paris"). The name in my language helps me navigate the map, and
the local name helps me navigate the world with the map.
These are definitely some hard problems.