New subject: Wiki system message commons?

11 Jan 2005

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 19:40:51 -0500, Stephen Forrest
&lt;stephen.forrest(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

...
  I suspect that the idea behind James' question was
to share MediaWiki
 system messages across Wikipedias in the same language.  (This is
 because I happen to know that the Language*.php system is not used on
 the Anglo-Saxon wikipedia.) 
Unless I'm much mistaken, this is simply a case of no-one having
created the LanguageAng.php file yet. Surely, once all the messages have
been defined, you can *create* that file, and thus copy all the
changes to new wikis. Or is there some reason that Anglo-Saxon has
been denied its own translation file?

...
  For example, once we define on ang.wikipedia.org the
value "Sibba
 hwierfunga" for the MediaWiki variable MediaWiki:Recentchangeslinked,
 it might be nice to automagically have the same customisation
 available to ang.wikibooks.org or ang.wikinews.org (if the latter
 existed). 
That sounds like a question of co-ordination: there should be a master
translation [in ang.wikipedia.org's MediaWiki namespace, perhaps] that
is being regularly imported to all other wikis as it progresses [with
appropriate scripts, bots, or whatever, to assist].
OK, so that's not as nice as having it central, but I hold to my
argument that the MediaWiki namespace is for *customisation* not
*translation*.

...
  I would argue that the MediaWiki messages are most
useful if they are
 language-specific, not project-specific.  If English Wikipedia and
 English Wikinews have need of different translations for the same
 MediaWiki variable, then this is evidence that one or both need to
 introduce another, project-specific MediaWiki variable for this
 specific purpose. 
No, that's not the way it works. Every message in the MediaWiki
namespace represents a part of the interface, used by the software
when displaying pages *on that particular wiki*. It allows users [with
admin/sysop status] to change the text of these parts of the interface
*to suit that particular wiki*, over-riding the standard-issue generic
translation contained in LanguageXX.php.

For instance, MediaWiki:Currentevents and MediaWiki:Currentevents-url
contain the label and location, respectively, of one of the links in
the navigation box; they allow that link to be used for different
purposes on different projects, or to be turned off completely. You
can also add messages to the users of a particular wiki in appropriate
places, such as MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning or MediaWiki:Sitesubtitle;
but you can't just "introduce a new variable". Some of these
customisations may be worth applying to all Wikimedia projects in a
particular language, but many of them wouldn't be appropriate - or
wouldn't be supported by the different communities. Thus, apart from
making initial translations marginally easier to co-ordinate,
centralising MediaWiki: namespaces would be a lot of develepor effort
for a net loss of functionality.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]

Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wiki system message commons?