[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wiki system message commons?

[Tim Starling]

Rowan Collins wrote:
> 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?

LanguageXx.php files are complicated, hard to create and hard to update. 
Every language file has to be carefully checked by a developer for 
security flaws, and 9 times out of 10 there are PHP syntax errors. They 
also require much developer attention to commit to CVS and to put on to 
the live server. You can be sure that any proposal to reduce the need to 
use them will get my attention.

It was my hope that the MediaWiki namespace would largely do away with 
the need to create language files, however that need remained and recent 
developments (the growth in multi-language projects and the ability for 
users to select the interface language) have exacerbated our dependence 
on them.

-- Tim Starling