- I can just guess what is written in Chinese interface, so how did
you cover article names? Do you have both names: in Simplified and Traditional Chinese?
In most cases titles are converted using the same conversion system, i.e. using the conversion table and do a strtr(). For wierd situations, there is also support for manually specifying title conversion inside the article body, using this syntax: -{T|zh-cn:foo; zh-tw: bar}-
Also built in is the ability to find articles that are written in different variants when wikilinking.
Here is an example: Let's say that in the conversion table, "foo" in zh-cn is converted to "bar" in zh-tw and vice-versa. Now someone writing in zh-cn wrote an article titled "foo". When someone with zh-tw preferred sees the article, "bar" will be shown as the article title. Further, say someone using zh-tw edited some article which has a link [[bar]]. The system will identify that the article "foo" should be used for linking, if "bar" is not already created as a redirect.
btw, you should be able to change the interface at zh after you register an account;)
- I think MediaWiki should have one general module for
transliteration with extensions for specific languages. General module should be based on Chinese module. Is it possible to start to work in such way?
Indeed. I have always anticipated that the Chinese system can be generalized to other languages. Most of the code for the Chinese system is not specifically tied to the Chinese language, and some code refactoring can be done to provide better support for different languages. Please watch CVS HEAD for the next couple weeks for this to happen.
- Also, we should try to make system clever: Some formal and some
statistic methods can help in recognizing should we transliterate something or not (i.e.: if system find some non-Serbian Cyrillic letters, it should not transliterate it into Latin and vice versa).
That's certainly doable within the current system framework, but will require more specialized algorithms.