Hi,
I now have fixed the internal links in MessagesEn.php and all message files
from A to C (except MessagesAr.php which will follow later, blame my text
editor's rtl bugs). See
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8846
for patch files (all applied to SVN) and
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/languages/messages/?….
Basically I did replace things like "blabla see [[Project:help|help]]"
with "blabla see [[{{MediaWiki:helppage}}]]" (among other things like
localised namespace names and custom links, see below). See previous mails
for the detailed reasons.
However "{{MediaWiki:" is only temporary syntax as in multilingual wikis
people would also like to get linked to localised project pages in case they
exist. With my current patch this is possible if people customize the
messages for that language locally in their wiki. In order to reduce the need
for such customization we need a new special template token (maybe
called "{{link:") that would need to work the following way (I explain it
with the example of MediaWiki:helppage):
Embedd MediaWiki:helppage/your_language -> if not existing in the wiki
database: embedd MediaWiki:helppage -> if not existing in the wiki database
embedd 'helppage' from MessagesEn.php.
This would cause the following: Certain localised links can be activated by
local admins with one single MediaWiki namespace edit individually for each
language. This would be probably the best solution between "link hell into
nowhere" and "default language only links".
This approach is closely related to the solution idea of another link bug
(interface URLs resolution order (splitted from "Major flaws...")):
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2007-January/thread.html#29…
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2007-February/029335.html
So far to the reasons of my changes. My fix also means standardisation as the
same page links only need to be defined in one place.
Furthermore there is now a narrow set of link defining pages which is allowed
to be used in standard system messages (no custom link calls anylonger!):
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Configuration_settings#Page_customizat…
+ the new "MediaWiki:policy-url" link definition page. See also current
MessagesEn.php in SVN.
So my work resulted in these style guidelines for translations:
1) Do not use local namespace names in standard message strings. The same
applies for localised wiki markup (like translations of "thumb" and such).
Especially something like "Benutzerseite von [[Benutzer:$1|$1]]"
(German "user page of ...") instead of "Benutzerseite von
[[User:$1|$1]]" is
dangerous as the link does not work in wikis with a different name for user
namespace (basically all wikis with a default language other than German,
canonical namespace links get translated to localised, use {{ns:user}} and
such when not using alternative link text or text outside links).
2) Do not link article namespace images or or other local content. Something
like "Your [[IP adress]] has been blocked..." is wrong. It has to be "Your
IP
adress has been blocked...". No other wiki than Wikipedia or a wiki on
networking will usually have an article about IP adresses.
3) No Cross-wiki/interwiki links. Especially links like "[[w:en:IP adress]]"
are not allowed as well as interwiki link definitions into Wikimedia wikis
are removed in default MediaWiki.
4) Do not directly link any project pages in messages. Use only the link
definitions such as {{MediaWiki:helppage}}. Do not create new link
definitions in your local MessagesXX.php file.
As you probably can imagine, fixing all 151 message files takes quite a while
and thatfor I call for your help. As well I wasn't able to fix every link
(tagged with '# problem with link' in message files). So please retranslate
them now from the English original using the new link guidelines.
I will post a detailed list of affected message strings that need
retranslation on mediawiki-i18n-l
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n in the next hours
and hope there for coordination of the remaining message file fixes.
Have fun,
Arnomane