On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 8:37 PM, Platonides<Platonides(a)gmail.com> wrote:
You get a request for page Foo:Bar. It could be a page
name, or Foo
could mean Special in Bantu. How do you check (efficiently) over 300
languages?
Ouch. Okay, that's out for namespaces. It should work fine for
special page names, though, right? Although I guess that's
semi-pointless if the "Special:" part doesn't work.
Clearly it was a bad idea to use a character for namespace separator
that's allowed in page names. Crazy idea, but maybe we could still
change . . . would it cause conflicts to use ">", say? Then we could
display the namespace in a breadcrumb-y fashion, with spaces on either
side. Obviously we'd accept ":" forever as well, for compatibility.
I'd think it would be pretty easy to get most stuff working with a new
namespace separator, just some hackery with Title::secureAndSplit()
should do it.
I'd prefer an option (stored as a global
preference) to use canonical
names instead of localised ones. It doesn't need to redirect from
localised to canonical, simply keep the url which was inputted.
It's uncomfortable browsing to
xy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:something,
then moving to check it on yx.wikpedia, and having to go back to retype
the pagename because "Spécialis:somethingelese doesn't exist".
Having canonical pagenames also used to be helpful when browsing a wiki
on a foreign language to determine which link lead to eg. the
contributions of a user, by hovering the different options (now you will
need to change to ?uselang=).
This should work fine with a global language preference, shouldn't it?