Domas Mituzas wrote:
For something like {{SITENAME}} there is little reason to be looking it up every single time the message loads, so why not teach Mediawiki to pre-evaluate that and similar items before putting it in the message cache?
There is little reason to keep {{SITENAME}} in Mediawiki: namespace too :) Generally, this could be handled by simple bot.
The point is, then it won't get automatically updates from translatewiki. I don't support having a different syntax for mediawiki messages, but {{SITENAME}} can get susbstituted with a simple preg_replace (a str_replace if we know there won't be tags).
Do note, we end up with other messages, where people want to use singular/plural for e.g. 'Categories'.
plural can be treated the same way.