On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 18:58:12 -0800, Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com> wrote:
On Jan 11, 2005, at 6:51 PM, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Why not have a bunch of subpages off each
MediaWiki message page? One
subpage per language. Default values would work as they do now.
I'm fairly certain it already works this way, so you can customize
messages in each language on a given wiki if desired.
Wow! I have tried that (locally, of course) and it works! (e.g.
MediaWiki:Something/en) But, obviously, the basic idea of someone
manually copying some 1000 messages of a single translation to
hundreds of Wikimedia sites (not to mention he/she would need sysop
privileges on all wikis to do that) is useless.
When we basically only had one Wikipedia wiki per
language, editing the
messages in that wiki was generally sufficient, but now we have several
wikis per language and _any_ of our wikis may be optionally displayed
in _any_ language.
A problem that is not mentioned is also that the translations of
MediaWiki should be included in its distribution, so that someone who
installs MediaWiki should not get messages suitable for some two years
old version (if he gets anything at all).
I think the problem is that translators have to be able to write
(correct) PHP code and the file is security-sensitive. If we would
split the LanguageXx files to the low-level part (implementation of
the respective Language subclass) and the high-level part (plain
message catalog), the latter could be implemented in some other way
than direct PHP code, e.g. using GNU gettext. I have no idea what the
performance would be, but it would be much easier for anyone to
publish updated translation, and the developers would not need to do
detailed analysis of the code. (There are probably be _some_
security-sensitive items in the current version, but hopefully not
many, and even those could be (I believe) solved in future versions of
MW.)
-- [[ cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec ]]