On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 10:00 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)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