[Mediawiki-i18n] I18n of system messages horribly broken in multilanguage wikis since some months

[Rob Church]

On 08/12/06, Daniel Arnold <arnomane at gmx.de> wrote:
> As well do you know which software change did cause this to happen?

The only major thing I can think of that happened fairly recently is
that Tim gutted and rewrote a lot of the message storage and handling
mechanism.

I wouldn't, however, expect that he'd fail to test the new version
under Commons-like conditions, and I haven't attempted to confirm
that's the case here.

Sometimes, the MediaWiki software will refer to wfMsgForContent()
instead of bog standard wfMsg(). When that happens, the function is
supposed to return a message that is in the site content, or default
language, regardless of the current user's preference, and it's used
for data which is, e.g. licencing or important information, or that
which is about to be saved into the database.

On Commons, we have an override mechanism of sorts enabled, which
allows wfMsgForContent() to act the same as wfMsg() for some messages
- and honour the users' language preferences. It *sounds* like this
might now have become fucked up.

Your best bet would be to ask Brion Vibber or Tim Starling directly,
since I'm not aware of the full details of this "override" thing, and
I'm not in a position to check if it's been disabled.


Rob Church