[Foundation-l] Why hasn't the LocalisationUpdate extension been enabled?

Waldir Pimenta waldir at email.com
Thu Aug 13 08:57:51 UTC 2009


When the Vector skin became available, I tried it on my home wiki,
pt.wikipedia, and noticed that a great deal of its interface was still in
English. So I went to translatewiki.net and translated the remaining strings
to Portuguese. Then I waited, and waited.. and I am waiting until today, and
the skin still has the English strings on it. It's been almost a month.

This is bad for several reasons. On this specific context, it means that
non-English users of the Vector skin, which is supposed to increase
usability, will actually have potentially more trouble using it simply
because it is using a foreign language.

On a more general stance, this is also bad for translators, since we don't
have as much motivation to contribute when our translations lay unused for
so much time. It's exactly one of the arguments that was used a lot to
oppose the FlaggedRevisions extension: the immediacy of the edits going live
is what makes wikis so compelling. (disclaimer: I'm actualy in favor of
flagged revs; I would trade some immediacy for more stability. But not if
the delay means a month!)

It's also bad for MediaWiki in general, since the expansion of its language
support grows in a much slower pace.

I understand why it was chosen not to always run bleeding edge versions of
the software on the live Wikimedia wikis. But the LocalisationUpdate was
created precisely as a workaround to this, i.e, to allow updating the
localisation
without needing to update the software.

So my question is: why is it not enabled yet on most Wikimedia wikis?


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