[Wikipedia-l] Wiki system message commons?

[James R. Johnson]

If a sysop wished to supress a message is a wiki, say wikibooks, why not
have a checkmark next to that message for each wiki, and any unchecked wiki
will not use that message?  That'd take care of a particular wiki wanting to
utilize a particular message not used in the others.

So:  

   
________________w_b_q_d
|       |      |       |
|  msg  |  lala|*   * *| message "lala" gets used in all but wikibooks.
|       |      |       |
-----------------------

James

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Rowan Collins
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2005 2:48 AM
To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wiki system message commons?

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 19:40:51 -0500, Stephen Forrest
<stephen.forrest at gmail.com> wrote:

> I suspect that the idea behind James' question was to share MediaWiki
> system messages across Wikipedias in the same language.  (This is
> because I happen to know that the Language*.php system is not used on
> the Anglo-Saxon wikipedia.)

Unless I'm much mistaken, this is simply a case of no-one having
created the LanguageAng.php file yet. Surely, once all the messages have
been defined, you can *create* that file, and thus copy all the
changes to new wikis. Or is there some reason that Anglo-Saxon has
been denied its own translation file?

> For example, once we define on ang.wikipedia.org the value "Sibba
> hwierfunga" for the MediaWiki variable MediaWiki:Recentchangeslinked,
> it might be nice to automagically have the same customisation
> available to ang.wikibooks.org or ang.wikinews.org (if the latter
> existed).

That sounds like a question of co-ordination: there should be a master
translation [in ang.wikipedia.org's MediaWiki namespace, perhaps] that
is being regularly imported to all other wikis as it progresses [with
appropriate scripts, bots, or whatever, to assist].
OK, so that's not as nice as having it central, but I hold to my
argument that the MediaWiki namespace is for *customisation* not
*translation*.

> I would argue that the MediaWiki messages are most useful if they are
> language-specific, not project-specific.  If English Wikipedia and
> English Wikinews have need of different translations for the same
> MediaWiki variable, then this is evidence that one or both need to
> introduce another, project-specific MediaWiki variable for this
> specific purpose.

No, that's not the way it works. Every message in the MediaWiki
namespace represents a part of the interface, used by the software
when displaying pages *on that particular wiki*. It allows users [with
admin/sysop status] to change the text of these parts of the interface
*to suit that particular wiki*, over-riding the standard-issue generic
translation contained in LanguageXX.php.

For instance, MediaWiki:Currentevents and MediaWiki:Currentevents-url
contain the label and location, respectively, of one of the links in
the navigation box; they allow that link to be used for different
purposes on different projects, or to be turned off completely. You
can also add messages to the users of a particular wiki in appropriate
places, such as MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning or MediaWiki:Sitesubtitle;
but you can't just "introduce a new variable". Some of these
customisations may be worth applying to all Wikimedia projects in a
particular language, but many of them wouldn't be appropriate - or
wouldn't be supported by the different communities. Thus, apart from
making initial translations marginally easier to co-ordinate,
centralising MediaWiki: namespaces would be a lot of develepor effort
for a net loss of functionality.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]
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