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

[mike.lifeguard]

From: Andrew Whitworth [mailto:wknight8111 at gmail.com]
>Now, I won't disparage the idea that standardized user-welcome and
>user-warning templates would be nice for under-populated small wikis,
>and I'm sure the SWMT would love these. However, there are going to be
>a lot of exceptions for larger and more-established wikis that do not
>want to share message templates with meta/en.wikipedia.

Exactly! And the babel templates are exactly the same. /If/ we decide to
have a system standardized across wikis (a good idea, IMO) then hardcoding
them is not an optimal solution. Neither would it be optimal for warning
templates or anything else I mentioned. I'm actually not advocating that -
rather I'm saying that if you want a sub-optimal solution, then you might as
well have a sub-optimal solution for the general problem.

The optimal solution is something like:
* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12306
* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9890
* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4547
* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9890

There's no reason to put content into the code - the babel templates are
templates just like any other.

I suppose in the short-term, a sub-optimal solution is acceptable, but I
just don't see the problem this solution is for. (Hypothetically it is
there, but in practice, it is not serious, in my experience)

Mike