Casey Brown wrote:
You still aren't understanding me... I'm *love* the idea of an extension to do this, I would rather we install it/one with the best features first (especially if it's Wikimedia-wide).
"Perfect is the greatest enemy of the good enough." I still haven't looked at the specific extension being proposed, but, assuming it doesn't somehow irreversibly drive us down a dead end, we can always start with what we have and improve it later.
Please check *your* fact first. :-) I am *for* the extension, I just wish it were tweaked to be more efficient. I'm surprised no one is yelling "enwiki-centric" because the levels were in-fact based off of enwiki...
Well, installing a global extension obviously forces global standardization of the levels. There's two relatively obvious ways to go about that: either pick the largest common subset (which would essentially be the 0/1/2/3/native system from Commons) or the smallest common superset (which would more or less be the 0/1/2/3/4/native/5/... system from enwiki) of the various systems currently in use.
The choice comes essentially down to which one you'd rather deal with: a bunch of vaguely defined and overlapping crufty "vanity" levels cluttering up the system, or bazillion enwiki users screaming bloody murder because you're taking away their "expert level" babel box.
Of course, it occurs to me that it might be possible to have it both ways: set up the global system with only the few globally used levels, and let individual projects maintain any additional levels they want using either local additions to the extension or simply the existing template-based mechanism.
(However, as issue worth considering is that, if we allow local additions to the babel extension, some people *will* want to migrate *all* their userboxes to it.)