TL;DR: Parsoid isn't i18n friendly and uses English keywords instead of
localized.[1] Is it a bug or feature? Please voice your opinion!
Longer version:
For some funny reasons Parsoid is reading arrays from "right to left"[1],
that is, it uses the LAST alias of the magic words rather than the first
one[2].
One of the reasons for this is because in English the shorter "thumb" is
preferred compared to the long "thumbnail". However, instead of fixing
MessagesEn.php to define thumb as the first option, parsoid uses the last
option.
This choice result in all other wikis using the English alias (which
appears last in magic words) rather than the localized one - so Parsoid
isn't i18n friendly.
However there are different POVs regarding the correct solution for it:
1. Use English aliases in all projects - these are the most used aliases
[and one of the reasons is people copying code from enwiki or using biased
tools such as Parsoid]
2. Use localized aliases - keep the article content and syntax in the same
language. This is especially important for non-latin languages with
different alphabet.
And there is a consensus for English being bad choice for RTL languages as
it cause mixed directional content which should be avoided. So if we go
with 1 choice, RTL languages should be exception.
I believe there is a cultural point of view here, and would like to hear
what do you think (especially non RTL and non English speakers): Do you
prefer mini (German), vignette (French), miniaturadeimagen (Spanish), мини
(Russian) instead of thumb (for example)?
I did some dump-minning to get the usage statistics:
https://phab.wmfusercontent.org/file/data/bskxfupspqo64dnnkdr7/PHID-FILE-v4…
And based on this I wrote a python script to suggest a reordering of the
aliases by usage[3], so if choice 2 is selected, we can merge[2] and all
languages will use the preferred choice.
[1]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T53852
[2]
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/244254/3/lib/wts.LinkHandler.js
[3]
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/247914