On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 10:00 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
I'm not sure I'd call what you're proposing a major architectural undertaking, though perhaps I'm defining a much narrower problem scope.
Yeah. A lot depends on whether or not we want language to be a first class citizen at the same level as a namespace throughout MediaWiki, for an installation that contains multiple languages. So for example, should various special pages that currently offer namespace filters also offer language filters? Should page uniqueness be constrained by title, namespace and language, as opposed to title and namespace as it is today?
One could make the case that not offering a lot of filtering by language is OK for multilingual wikis, since one of the conscious choices when setting up a wiki that way is that languages are precisely not going to be segregated, and the boundaries between language content are going to be fairly fluid compared with, say, the setup used for Wikipedia. I do think it's worth talking about the user experience benefits of either approach, but clearly a fair bit could be achieved by just improving the user experience around the most basic interactions in navigation and page creation.
Still, at a most basic level, it'd be nice to have at least a standard approach for title disambiguation, so folks don't have to manually figure out how to distinguish the Spanish "Portada" from the Catalan "Portada" every time that type of issue arises. The common approach to just pick "English word/language suffix" has its own issues, so perhaps the software could intelligently follow a standard disambiguation convention, e.g. adding a suffix but only if required.
Erik