Dear WikiTech,

I have downloaded and installed the Wikipedia script from CVS, and have set it up for use in a private wiki I am running. I picked the wikipedia script because it is such a well- and actively-maintained script and it has so many useful features that I'm used to as an active wikipedian.

Overall, I found customizing the script quite easy. I don't know if generalization of the script to other wiki applications is one of your goals, but if it is, then the following would be helpful:

1) Wikipedia-specific strings in $wgAllMessagesEn:

Many of the messages in $wgAllMessagesEn are wikipedia-specific. I overrode these by creating a $wgAllMessagesEn in LanguageEn.php, which I figured would change less than Language.php. I was able to resolve this without much problem, but it would be nice if this array could be split into smaller chunks, to make it easier to override one variable but not all. It would be really nice if one of the smaller arrays could be a $wgLocalStringsEn with defaults commented out in LocalSettings.php

2) Namespace, Interwiki

It would be nice if it were obvious how to override namespace names and the interwiki array in LocalSettings.php so you don't have to hunt it down.

Also, unrelated, I noticed after I changed the text for "Recent Changes" that it actually resolves each link in the text (which I assume costs database lookups). This seems colossally wasteful to me. People are not going to be in the business of linking to non-existing articles on recent changes very long, and recent changes is one of the most frequently-hit articles, no?

Thanks for your work,

~~~

PS. please cc: me on answers.