[Foundation-l] Downtime error message turned into monolingual

[MZMcBride]

KIZU Naoko wrote:
> I've got an error message in trying to access Japanese Wikipedia. It
> seems long, but it's not my topic.
> IIRC the message from server was multilingualized years ago and we
> have offered the message with links to other lang
> same messages.
> 
> The message itself seems not changed from the past, but now it's in
> English and only without any links to any other language.
> 
> What happened? Who decided to remove lang links? And what is the idea
> behind of this removal?

Hi.

I believe you're referring to this error message:
<http://ja.wikipedia.org/w/&amp;>.

I remember it being multi-lingual as well. It was also enormous. I'm not
sure when or why it was shortened (though my suspicion is that it was
shortened because it was enormous). The planning for the message appears to
have taken place here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_error_messages

I don't see any bugs in Bugzilla off-hand about this being shortened to use
only English. There's a bug from June 2010 about the language selector being
broken: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23944  That gives a
shorter timeframe in which to look for the message being shortened (sometime
between June 2010 and December 2010).

You probably want to e-mail wikitech-l about this. I doubt many people on
this list will have much insight into this issue. Or file a bug in Bugzilla
to re-add multi-language support if you're feeling adventurous. The worst
case scenario is that it will be resolved as a duplicate bug.

Hope that helps.

MZMcBride