Aryeh Gregor wrote:
Tangentially, is there any actual reason we couldn't allow any language's alias (e.g., for special page names or namespaces) to work in any other language? We'd have to make sure we have a moderately sane way of resolving conflicts, but those should be extremely uncommon.
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? 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=). That's a feature that wouldn't be used by most users, but people doing crosswiki work, like stewards or members of SWMT, would surely find it useful.