On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 5:24 PM, Marcus Buckwiki@marcusbuck.org wrote:
But that would be inconsistent with us localising special page names which too appear in URLs only.
Special page names also appear in the title of the page when you view it, which is a very visible location. And on Special:AllPages, and probably other places. It's not the same at all.
On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 7:27 PM, Brion Vibberbrion@wikimedia.org wrote:
They're *certainly* comparable -- namespaces and special page names have canonical names (ASCII-friendly English), per-language localizations and aliases, and locally-configured aliases and overrides (via config file).
Well, yes, but we could add those for anything. We *could* add per-language localizations for GET parameters too, if we liked; it wouldn't be too hard, just add some magic to WebRequest and start converting HTML outputters. But that would be unreasonable. I agree that more localization is good, but where's the dividing line? The usergroup name in this case is only a GET parameter value dressed up as a subpage. Should we also localize log subpages? How many other special pages behave like this?
This is a trade-off which is usually friendlier to most users (they can read the text in URLs in their own language) while moderately annoying to some power users use cases (copy-pasting a path from one site to another may not work, it may be harder to identify pages on a site whose language you do not speak but are performing maintenance editing or debugging on).
Tangentially, is there any actual reason we couldn't allow any language's alias (e.g., for special page names or namespaces) to work in any other language? We'd have to make sure we have a moderately sane way of resolving conflicts, but those should be extremely uncommon.
It would not be terribly difficult to use content-language localized forms on the special page URLs where we most prominently use group names, or at least to accept them if provided; the primary problem area I see is in providing backwards-compatibility when the localizations change.
For Special:ListUsers, a possibly more serious problem is that the localized group name might conflict with a username, since the parameter is overloaded. We avoid conflicts right now only because canonical group names are conventionally all lowercase, and usernames can't start with a lowercase letter. (At least not a lowercase ASCII letter?)