Aryeh Gregor hett schreven: 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. Marcus Buck User:Slomox

On 8/30/09 8:08 PM, Happy-melon wrote: 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

Aryeh Gregor 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? 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.

Aryeh Gregor wrote: Special page names are better in the sense that you know what it is offhand, but i'm not sure if such search is still acceptable. I don't think it'd get too much support. You would need to deal with the parser, for linking to non-ns0 namespaces. I'd prefer not to add a new complexity there. Only for the later usecase. And it's more intrusive. You may want some wikis to be kept on the original language and understand enough for the other just with url tips.

Aryeh Gregor wrote: They still are a lot of languages? There might be ugly cases of <nowiki> or other tag extensions inside [[ getting a different behavior. The special page names are shown in the content language, not in the user language.

Platonides wrote: With array_key_exists(), surely? It's (AFAIK) a (nearly) constant-time hash lookup. Of course, you don't want to have to load 300 Messages*.php files just to populate that array in the first place, but that just means that we'd have to consolidate the namespace aliases into a single file if we wanted to do this, rather than scattering them across hundreds of files like we do now. I've actually long wanted something like this for Commons. At the very least, It Would Be Nice If all the localized aliases of the File/Image namespace were added to $wgNamespaceAliases for Commons. -- Ilmari Karonen