On 8/30/09 8:08 PM, Happy-melon wrote:
"Marcus Buck"wiki@marcusbuck.org wrote in message news:4A9AEE20.7000005@marcusbuck.org...
But that would be inconsistent with us localising special page names which too appear in URLs only. So in my opinion they should be localized.
Not true: special page names are localised in the JS variables (wgPageName, for instance), and in the class applied to<body>; and of course in links everywhere across the site. The two aren't at all comparable. The comparison of user or page ids is much more accurate.
They're *certainly* comparable -- namespaces and special page names have canonical names (ASCII-friendly English), per-language localizations and aliases, and locally-configured aliases and overrides (via config file).
We've always exposed the content-language localized variants of the namespaces to URLs, and started doing this for special page names as well in more recent years.
This is a trade-off which is usually friendlier to most users (they can read the text in URLs in their own language) while moderately annoying to some power users use cases (copy-pasting a path from one site to another may not work, it may be harder to identify pages on a site whose language you do not speak but are performing maintenance editing or debugging on).
User groups have canonical names (usually ASCII-friendly English), and two localized forms (for individual members and for the group as a whole), which are set via the localization system or locally configured via MediaWiki: messages.
It would not be terribly difficult to use content-language localized forms on the special page URLs where we most prominently use group names, or at least to accept them if provided; the primary problem area I see is in providing backwards-compatibility when the localizations change.
With namespace names and special page names maintained in the localization files or via site configuration, we take great care to keep old names as aliases when they're changed in order to keep old links working if possible.
There's currently no similar alias infrastructure for localized group names, which are provided and formatted for use in UI output and not (yet?) intended for URL input.
-- brion