Jamie Bliss wrote:
I wrote such a feature before, but with the parameter &debugmsg=1 rather than as a "pseudo-language". It was live at some point, but apparently it's not anymore. Someone must have reverted it.
That is a feature I don't quite understand. Why would a bot want it? To simplify screen-scraping?
Well, when *I* wrote it it was not targeted for bots, but rather for people trying to translate the interface or trying to correct an error they found. Seeing a string in context gives you a better idea of what it should translate as, so I thought it would be useful to be able to append &debugmsg=1 to see the stringcode and then find it to do the translation/correction.
What about messages like [[MediaWiki:Sidebar]], which are not litterally pasted?
That *may* be the reason the feature was removed again.