On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 02:23, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il
wrote:
As far as i understand, a Centralized gadgets repository is being worked on, and it is supposed to solve this issue in an elegant way, but i don't know what its actual status is.
While Centralized gadget repository is indeed a need and might solve the issue in a way, IMO there is another way. The cite templates usage and complexity in English Wikipedia is bit high and if one were to use the centralized gadget in a language wiki, they need to copy all the templates and carefully localize so that it does not break. And debugging templates/js can be painful, trust me. What would be ideal is to look the requirement and see if there are alternates / write your own. For example, we didnt localize Twinkle in Tamil because we hardly use more than 10 templates for page tagging. So we went ahead and localized tagger[1] which fits our size, saved time, does the job well.
If i'm wrong about assuming that it's being worked on, then the JavaScript code has to be copied and localized manually, which would be tedious.
Copying code is not just tedious, but also bad thing because one needs to keep track of versioning and keep doing the tedious job again. (We copied WikiLove v1 and sitting with it due to laziness) So unless its a code that you can support, avoid copying. Its ideal to have the js code localizable and wish more developers know and care about writing code that supports internationalization.
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Hoo_man/Scripts/Tagger