[Commons-l] Automatic messages to users: guessing user preferred language

[Alexandre NOUVEL]

Hi list,

I've seen that some users run bots that add some message templates to
user  talk pages, generally in order to warn them about missing tags and
other similar problems.

The problem is that bots are not able to guess the preferred user
language :)

As for now, here are some clues about the user preferred language:
* he has a Babel box on his user page or on his talk page => the highest
skill could do it
* he has a Welcome template or another message template that is not in
English => get the lang code from the template translation subpage, but
actually this is quite difficult because templates are generally subst'd
and no link remains to the translation page...

Then, which tools could we set up to know in an easier way the user
preferred language?

I'd say:
* other users check the user contributions and guess his preferred
language, then add some {{guessed language|<language code>}} template to
the user talk page. This very template would provide information about
how to add a Babel box. This is not much better than adding a Welcome
template, so I don't think it to be a good solution.
* some toolserver asking the database and returning as raw text the
preferred language code that the user has set up in his preferences.
This seems to me the best way to handle automatically this information,
but shall assume that the user has set up this information. I think it's
okay because when we need to contact this user, that's because he
interacted on the project and has a high probability of having set up
his preferences...

Any thoughts? Any volunteers to code such a simple tool? :)

Best regards from France,
-- 
Alexandre.NOUVEL at alnoprods.net
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