On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 18:58:12 -0800, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
On Jan 11, 2005, at 6:51 PM, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Why not have a bunch of subpages off each MediaWiki message page? One subpage per language. Default values would work as they do now.
I'm fairly certain it already works this way, so you can customize messages in each language on a given wiki if desired.
Wow! I have tried that (locally, of course) and it works! (e.g. MediaWiki:Something/en) But, obviously, the basic idea of someone manually copying some 1000 messages of a single translation to hundreds of Wikimedia sites (not to mention he/she would need sysop privileges on all wikis to do that) is useless.
When we basically only had one Wikipedia wiki per language, editing the messages in that wiki was generally sufficient, but now we have several wikis per language and _any_ of our wikis may be optionally displayed in _any_ language.
A problem that is not mentioned is also that the translations of MediaWiki should be included in its distribution, so that someone who installs MediaWiki should not get messages suitable for some two years old version (if he gets anything at all).
I think the problem is that translators have to be able to write (correct) PHP code and the file is security-sensitive. If we would split the LanguageXx files to the low-level part (implementation of the respective Language subclass) and the high-level part (plain message catalog), the latter could be implemented in some other way than direct PHP code, e.g. using GNU gettext. I have no idea what the performance would be, but it would be much easier for anyone to publish updated translation, and the developers would not need to do detailed analysis of the code. (There are probably be _some_ security-sensitive items in the current version, but hopefully not many, and even those could be (I believe) solved in future versions of MW.)
-- [[ cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec ]]