Hello!
I noticed at sr.wikipedia there is an option "Variant" under "Internationalization" at the preferences. How is that different from the 'sr', 'sr-ec' and 'sr-el' which are shown at "Language" option (also under "Internationalization")?
I'm interested in this because there are some differences between "Brazilian Portuguese" ('pt-br') and "Portuguese of Portugal" ('pt') which usually cause troubles for the admins at the Portuguese projects, who needs to warn the users not to change the wording of the texts from one variant to another (this usually happens, mainly from anonymous contributions), because some differences between the variants seems to be [at a first glance] a typo, and they want to "correct" it...
So, I would like to know if there is currently any feature which could help us to avoid the problem of having a divided community of users ('pt' x 'pt-br') "fighting" with each other ad infinitum... (and to avoid proposals like that [1] of a new "Brazilian Wikipedia", which IMHO will not have any good result, and is not the better way of solving the problem...)
I found [http://strategy.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Proposal_talk%3AA_Brazilian_... a comment] about the existence of "on-the-fly translation" for some languages (Chinese and Serbian), but I don't know how it works, and if it solves or improve the situation.
And before this I was also thinking of use (a possible enhanced version of) a procedure like this: considering that currently it is possible to show a system message using {{int:MESSAGE}} in the wikitext in a way that the result changes according to the user's language, would it be possible to create new messages at "MediaWiki:" Namespace just for defining language variants of words which usually appears at the content of the projects? For example, would it be possible to create "MediaWiki:WORD/pt-br" and "MediaWiki:WORD/pt", and use them (with {{int:WORD}}) instead of the actual word variant in wikitext? This isn't likely to be the better solution, but it could be a first step towards a solution...
Any thoughts on how could Portuguese community improve the situation at pt.* projects? (is there any other list I should ask about this?)
Helder
[1] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:A_Brazilian_Portuguese_Wikipedia