[Mediawiki-i18n] [Commons-l] Enabling the Translate and UniversalLanguageSelector extensions on Commons

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Bence Damokos, 21/01/2013 19:03:
 > IIRC, the Translate extension can only handle one source language as the
 > basis of translation (so on Meta you can only use it for texts that are
 > originally in English). Has this been changed to work better with
 > multilingual content?

No, but this would be of use only for file descriptions, basically. It's 
unlikely that Commons would change file descriptions to a subpage system 
in the short term, especially as the UploadWizard relies on the current 
system and there are still thousands of templates and perhaps hundreds 
of project pages with incomplete translation.
Perhaps this may happen when metadata will be split to a subpage using 
ContentHandler. <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Files_and_licenses_concept>

Jean-Frédéric, 21/01/2013 14:53:
> For my little experience with the way the extension works on Meta, I see
> how it works to translate single pages, or messages assembled in a
> single page − this could indeed be very useful for all our multilingual
> pages (policy, help, etc.)

For pages it would be very easy to start if they don't have translations 
(but have good content), and easy to start with some conversion work for 
those with existing translations. Commons, as far as I've seen, doesn't 
have the mess of templates Meta has (with 3 or 4 generations of 
different systems) and this should help too.

>
> Could the extension can, or be tweaked to, help with our other
> multilingual content? I can think of:
> * templates (whether using Autotranslate/Fallback, LangSwitch, or
> special constructs like {{Technique}})
> * file descriptions ?
> * POTD descriptions ?
> * SiteNotice announcements ?

This needs to be studies by those who know those systems better. For 
file descriptions see above; {{autotranslate}} could work as is, for 
what I know; LS is already deprecated and should be killed at least for 
templates (multichill told me very few if any still use it, right?); 
POTD I have no idea; sitenotice is a custom hack of Commons from what I 
know, should work with some adaptation.
Most relevant docs are at
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Translate/Page_translation_administration>
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Translate/Unstructured_element_translation>

>
>     The UniversalLanguageSelector extension (
>     https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector )
>     allows users to easily switch the interface language; it also embeds
>     an interface to enter text in non-Latin languages even if your
>     keyboard doesn't allow it.
>
>
> Seems very useful indeed.
>
> Just asking: would it play nicely with our AnonymousI18N script?
> <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:AnonymousI18N.js>

If it's what I remember, that would be superseded.

>
> Incidently, Rillke has openend a section on [[COM:VPP]] on this.
> <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:VPP#Elaborate_whether_mw:Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector_is_suitable_for_Commons>
>
>
>
>     There would probably be some adjustments to make to transition from
>     the current way we handle multilingual content and interface, but I
>     don't perceive them as insurmountable.
>
>
> Yes. Indeed, I wondered above how the Extension would fit with our black
> magic, but we can certainly think of revamping our magic to benefit from
> the extensions.

Yes, and this requires that people who know the black magic study the 
extension a bit: devs can give better answers than me but it's still up 
to the community to decide what to do.
You could play with the extension a bit: 1) you can ask translation 
admin rights on mediawiki.org or Meta and set up some pages for 
translation, 2) I (or others) can easily give translation admin + sysop 
on testwiki to do more or less whatever you wish.

Nemo