Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
The system may work fine on Meta... That is fine for Meta. I am interested in seeing it work on other wikis where it does not work.
Meta's template system was not designed for Meta only; it is the result of collaboration in various crosswiki channels and wiki discussions with users from many wikis. The levels and descriptions were carefully selected after such discussion and an analysis of the levels used on the top 10 wikis. On the other hand, the extension seems to have copied the levels verbatim from en-Wikipedia. I think the extension would be more appropriate for global implementation if it used Meta's more global and better described levels (although a crosswiki template transclusion extension would be a better solution). http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pathoschild/Crosswiki_babelboxes http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Babel/Archives/2008-03#New_babel_templates
Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
Well, installing a global extension obviously forces global standardization of the levels. There's two relatively obvious ways to go about that: either pick the largest common subset (which would essentially be the 0/1/2/3/native system from Commons) or the smallest common superset (which would more or less be the 0/1/2/3/4/native/5/... system from enwiki) of the various systems currently in use.
The template system on Meta uses 0-4 and Native, based on the discussion and crosswiki analysis described above. I think that is a more appropriate choice for a global extension than copying en-Wikipedia's levels.
Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@googlemail.com wrote:
A difference to my user pages at de.WP is that there is no level 4 at Meta, did I get that right? Another difference: at Meta there are only categories for User de, User eo and so on, but not for the levels (de-M, eo-4...). Is this the point we are talking about?
There is a level 4, which says something like "This user can read and write at a near-native level in <language>".
There's one category per language, but they're sorted into lists by proficiency. For example, see the category description for http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:User_de. You can click on the links in the English category description to jump directly to the list of users of a given proficiency.