[Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Implementing the Babel extension

Tue Jul 1 22:07:57 UTC 2008

On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 5:51 PM, Brion Vibber <brion at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> That is of course ridiculous, only a couple of templates should be
> required for "box with a number in it".

Remarkably, at least some of them appear to be manually-typed-out
HTML, or substed or something.  Apparently people didn't believe in
meta-templates?

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:User_ksh&action=edit
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:User_zh&action=edit

Some use a template . . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:User_de&action=edit

. . . but it's {{userbox}}.  Evidently something like

{{babel|de|German language|Dieser Benutzer spricht '''[[:Category:User
de|Deutsch]]''' als '''[[:Category:User de-N|Muttersprache]]'''.}}

didn't seem useful to anyone.

To be fair, though, you really do have to have one template for each
language/proficiency combination, if you want the sentence saying
"This user speaks Old Church Slavonic on a native level" or whatever
properly translated to each and every one of the hundreds of languages
that at least one person speaks.  Whether this is grounds for an
extension, rather than a bunch of master templates on Meta that get
copied out to the projects regularly by friendly neighborhood bots, is
a separate question.  (Now, if the extension were one to enable scary
transclusion in a sane fashion . . .)