[Commons-l] user language pref

[bawolff]

On 10/4/07, Alexandre NOUVEL <alexandre.nouvel at alnoprods.net> wrote:
>
> 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
> |-> http://alnoprods.net
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>
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Don't forget {{notify me}}. You can get lang info from that too.

-bawolff