[Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Implementing the Babel extension

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 1:30 AM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> The system may work fine on Meta... That is fine for Meta. I am interested
> in seeing it work on other wikis where it does not work.

This part is, I think, the most important selling point of the
extension, and one which has not been given proper emphasis. We're not
just talking about meta or en.wikipedia, although I'm sure many people
have trouble thinking beyond a handful of the largest or most
prominent wikis. We have hundreds of individual projects, all of which
could benefit from the standardization that this extension brings.
With SUL a reality now, people have been demonstratively more willing
to move cross-project and explore new projects. Our users should be
able to express their language proficiencies and find
language-specific help on any project that they visit.

If we want to have a unified system for expressing a user's language
proficiencies, we need more then a thousand templates on one wiki.
People have better things to do then worry about copying, importing,
or recreating thousands of templates. Even creating a small number of
parameterized templates isn't helpful, because users aren't going to
be familiar with the parameters to these templates on every wiki. It
simplifies the implementation, certainly, but it does nothing to
improve standardization or inter-project unity.

I am in favor of the concept behind this extension. I have not had
much experience with it's implementation, however.

--Andrew Whitworth