On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 5:24 PM, Marcus Buck<wiki(a)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 Vibber<brion(a)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?)