[Wikimedia-l] This weird trick will make readers of mass messages on village pumps happier

[MZMcBride]

(Sorry about the mis-post. Apparently hitting command-return sends a
message... who knew.)

James Forrester wrote:
>On 17 January 2014 08:24, Amir E. Aharoni
><amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il>wrote:
>> Put it inside the following HTML tag:
>> <div lang="en" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr">
>> Your important notification.
>> </div>
>>
>> Of course, it's not great to have to remember to write it every time,
>>so if there is a way to automate in MassMessage or EdwardsBot or
>>whatever is used to send these messages, it would be great.
>
>Filed as https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60176

Agreed that it's not great. On the other hand, if you're communicating
with a global audience, there's a little expectation that it'll be
slightly more work, in my opinion. :-)

This same point is true of mass messaging generally, regardless of
language or wrapper divs or what-have-you. If you're doing something once
or you're doing something ten-thousand times _at_ once, you need to
appropriately take the time to make sure you're crossing your Ts and
dotting your Is before hitting send.

(And for the record, MassMessage will not be implementing that
command-return shortcut. Gah.)

Not including a timestamp is another pattern of behavior that causes
issues: due to the way that archive bots operate, they need an
identifiable timestamp. I believe the thinking there was to add some
JavaScript to check for the presence of "~~~~~" or equivalent and warn the
user if it's not present (just warn, not stop). We could do something
similar for dir="" and such perhaps.

Or we could add a "my content is in [lang name]" drop-down menu that
defaults to the user's language preference, maybe.

<div lang="en" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr">

I guess you'd need to map language name to lang="" and then have a
dictionary for which are rtl and which are ltr, which could then also
control the class? Bleh.

Or browsers could just forgive us for our trespasses and not misbehave.

Perhaps others have thoughts about how to do this well. It doesn't seem
like a very easy problem, but maybe I'm missing the obvious.

MZMcBride