Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 8:37 PM, PlatonidesPlatonides@gmail.com wrote:
You get a request for page Foo:Bar. It could be a page name, or Foo could mean Special in Bantu. How do you check (efficiently) over 300 languages?
Ouch. Okay, that's out for namespaces. It should work fine for special page names, though, right? Although I guess that's semi-pointless if the "Special:" part doesn't work.
Special page names are better in the sense that you know what it is offhand, but i'm not sure if such search is still acceptable.
Clearly it was a bad idea to use a character for namespace separator that's allowed in page names. Crazy idea, but maybe we could still change . . . would it cause conflicts to use ">", say?
I don't think it'd get too much support.
Then we could display the namespace in a breadcrumb-y fashion, with spaces on either side. Obviously we'd accept ":" forever as well, for compatibility. I'd think it would be pretty easy to get most stuff working with a new namespace separator, just some hackery with Title::secureAndSplit() should do it.
You would need to deal with the parser, for linking to non-ns0 namespaces. I'd prefer not to add a new complexity there.
I'd prefer an option (stored as a global preference) to use canonical names instead of localised ones. It doesn't need to redirect from localised to canonical, simply keep the url which was inputted.
It's uncomfortable browsing to xy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:something, then moving to check it on yx.wikpedia, and having to go back to retype the pagename because "Spécialis:somethingelese doesn't exist". Having canonical pagenames also used to be helpful when browsing a wiki on a foreign language to determine which link lead to eg. the contributions of a user, by hovering the different options (now you will need to change to ?uselang=).
This should work fine with a global language preference, shouldn't it?
Only for the later usecase. And it's more intrusive. You may want some wikis to be kept on the original language and understand enough for the other just with url tips.