Chad hett schreven:
You're hitting on a core issue here, which is the
lack of
support for multilingual projects. Mediawiki does not
currently support this. Using hacks such as uselang has
helped hide the issue, but its far from ideal. I would
venture that multilingual content could be handled
with the user's language setting/headers/uselang
param being helpful to show the appropriate content.
Until that happens, each project only has one content
language. In cases like the ones you mentioned, this
happens to be English.
The facts are correct, but if you thereby implicate that
English thus
should be regarded as a valid output for non-English users of those
projects, I don't agree. This implication is wrong.
Let's suppose I use the French
Wikipedia with Arabic interface. I would find it very
odd that the content is not in French, even though I
use Arabic as my interface language.
The average user with a non-technical approach does not feel a strict
distinction between "interface" (served by the php scripts) and
"content" (rendered from database content). Especially on file
description pages (file history and file links for example appear as
headings just in the same way as the content headings). It won't seem
odd to me.
On multilingual projects, its ok to present in your
user
language. On single-language projects it is not. Using
uselang for content is an icky hack anyway. Multilingual
projects need to be supported in core, or we're just
going to perpetuate these hacks.
The ways of achieving and accessing may change in the future, but you
will never have a clear separation of "content" and localizable
elements. Multilang support can be as core as imaginable, but still you
will have localizable elements stored in "content" areas.
Basically, I figured support the majority of cases
(single
language projects) rather than the minority (multi-
language projects). The former get the benefit of the
hack, the latter see no change.
-Chad
Well, you could put it in other terms and the majority/minority thing
switches: content lang allows localization for monolang projects only,
when user lang allows it for _all_ projects. So content lang is the
minority. Whether Arabic file description pages for users of the French
Wikipedia preferring Arabic is a good or a bad thing is not decided and
not even decidable. There are some points for content lang, but no
strong points. There are some points for user lang, but no strong points
either. If there are equally good points for both solutions this
supports my interpretation of the majority/minority relation. Your
interpretation is based on the assumption that content lang on monolang
projects is _obviously_ a good thing.
Marcus Buck