[Mediawiki-l] Re-Writing page titles

[Anne Wilson]

While considering what we can do to make translated pages more accessible we 
come up against the fact that by default page names remain in English, with 
only the langcode appended.  This makes things difficult for, for instance, 
readers of Cyrillic or Chinese scripts.

One experiment has been to use redirects, so that the blahblah_(uk) page goes 
instead to one with a translated title.  For an example, see  
http://userbase.kde.org/Applications/Utilities_(uk). The only snags we see 
there are that there must be an awareness of the two-parts of the translation 
job, and that it will result in very many pages which contain only a redirect.  
Please correct me if I'm wrong in thinking that this will not put a 
significant extra load on the server.

There is a further problem, though, if we wish to avoid the English+langcode 
title.  Some pages consist of only an application name, which will not, of 
course, be translated.  At the moment we can't see any way other than using 
the langcode to separate them.  There is even the possiblity of other pages, 
particularly in Scandinavian languages, having the same page-name, due to 
similarities in the languages.  This seems to open up a huge can of worms.

We had a brief moment of hope when we saw {{DISPLAYTITLE:DesiredTitle}}, but 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Page_name seems to say that it can't help 
us.

Has anyone tackled these problems?  Or does anyone have any ideas?  Thanks

Anne
-- 
KDE Community Working Group
New to KDE4? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org
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