On Tuesday 30 January 2007 19:59:07 Simetrical wrote:
First of all, in general, there will always be a risk of breaking unusual stuff with our development model, because the testing phase depends on developers noticing stuff in their local copies. This not only is kind of shallow, it also totally ignores some options that might be very important to some wikis. Particularly relevant to this is that I assume every developer's local wiki is in their preferred language, and since they're the only user, it seems likely that they wouldn't have a different language from the default. Maybe someone runs a wiki with the content language different from their user language, but I at least don't (right now!).
I admit that this is probably never perfectly solvable given the fact that Wikimedia runs over 700 wikis. However with respect to language there are monolingual and multilingual wikis. Currently the multlingual wiki use case could need some more attention and I think this is easily possible even without beeing deeply involved into let us say Wikimedia Commons issues just by playing around in your own little test wiki.
[...] solution is: Drop the forced lower case in Monobook and if you don't like your UI strings starting with upper case in your language of choice make these strings lower case right from the start in vanilla MediaWiki. There is no other good solution.
Perhaps. The problem is that your solution affects other skins as well. It would be possible to add classes for the content and interface languages to body, but that won't necessarily work if some of the relevant messages are inheriting from some other language. I'm not sure how to best deal with this.
I'd say it is bad in any skin to rely on global lower case/upper case behaviour as this is not language dependent. And of course Monobook is the default for the large majority and it is a bit strange forcing the majority into non-standard language display because of that. Several times I got rants by people, why "Commons is so English cause it even forces German to lowercase" and that I as an admin (you know admins "can do everything") shall fix this first or people proceed ignoring Commons. Yea it is downright silly but true.
So if someone things that some (older) non-default skins shall rely on upper case, please insert in these skins a force-upper-case CSS definition. At least it would hurt way less people.
Note that English-language special page names will work on wikis in any language. However, that's probably bad to rely upon from an interface perspective, because some poor Chinese user or whatnot will see a bunch of Latin gibberish as the link target, I guess. Perhaps it would be ideal if all special-page names were universal, assuming that causes no conflicts. Then everyone could see the special page names in their own language in the interface.
I am not talking about special pages. These are fine with me (and I know that namespace names are reachable in every place with their english name as well). It is about linking pages like "Project:Administrateur" in MediaWiki:Blockedtext/fr from vanilla Mediawiki. This was truely done only with monolingual wikis in mind and never considering simultanous usage of different languages.
Arnomane