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