On Saturday 06 December 2008 17:49:04 Lars Aronsson wrote:
New user accounts on Wikimedia Commons automatically get a greeting from [[User:Wikimedia Commons Welcome]]. However, this greeting is in English and not all users speak English. At the top of the message there is a list of links to translations in other languages, but I think there is a better way.
Since most new user accounts on Commons (about two thirds) are created by SUL, and arrive through a link that specifies the uselang= parameter, wouldn't it be very easy to set the user preference for user interface language from the uselang parameter when the account is created by SUL?
The greeting template (and other templates, such as deletion requests) could then access the user's interface language setting through a {{USELANG}} magic word, and present the corresponding translation.
This way, new Swedish speaking users (who typically arrive from the Swedish Wikipedia, one that doesn't allow local uploads) could be guided to the Swedish language village pump and find a community there.
This perhaps isn't directly related to your initial query, but I was thinking along similar lines on how to make MediaWiki more internationalized.
MediaWiki is, of course, an excellently internationalized piece of software already. It works excellently with a lot of languages - but what it lacks is the ability to work with more languages at the same time. This is very important on Commons or Meta.
The first step would be to make uselang sticky (or to create a new parameter, for example 'forcelang'), as is the case now with 'variant'. Right now, when someone comes to http://commons.wikimedia.org/?uselang=sr everything is displayed in Serbian, properly, but when he/she clicks on "Log in / create account", the interface goes back to English and someone who doesn't know English can't create the account. But if you go to f.e. http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5&variant=zh-... you will see that variant parameter is "inherited" by the links on the page, and whenever you go on the wiki you will remain in the same variant. If uselang would work in the same way, that's one MAJOR improvement already. Since a system for doing this with 'variant' already works, I hope this wouldn't be too hard to do.
And then, what you say. But there exists one caveat - caching. More on this in some future email :)