[Mediawiki-i18n] LanguageConverter and "bidirectional" rules.

[C. Scott Ananian]

[apologies for the double-post, forgot to add a subject line the first
time!]

[cross-posted to mediawiki-i18n, languages@ and language committee mailing
lists. let me know if there's a better list to use for LanguageConverter
users.]

We're about ready to deploy initial support for LanguageConverter to
Parsoid and Visual Editor (see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T43716 and
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T49411 for background).

A naming issue has come up.  In https://www.mediawiki.org/
wiki/Writing_systems/Syntax there are two categories of rules:
"bidirectional" and "unidirectional".

First, before I ask more: if you are a user of LanguageConverter on your
home wiki, did you know that there was more than one type of rule?  And if
so, do you call them "bidirectional"/"unidirectional" or something else?

These names appear in the HTML DOM emitted by Parsoid (see
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Specs/HTML/1.5.0#Language_conversion_blocks).
There was concern that "bidir" as a field name would be confusing; in
particular that people would confuse this with RTL/LTR issues or the
Unicode "bidi" algorithm; neither of which are related at all.

As a user of LanguageConverter, do you find this naming confusing?  If
Visual Editor described these types of rules with a different name (say,
"symmetric"/"asymmetric") would that be a help or harm or neither?

The history of the "bidirectional" name in the PHP code appears to date
back to 2008 as far as I can tell ( https://github.com/wikimedia/
mediawiki/commit/69dbeb97f15b65dd5773852d76c3bc93caefc862 ) but they
haven't been strongly exposed in the UI AFAIK.  Perhaps they are present in
the UI for the noteTA gadget ( https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/
MediaWiki:Gadget-noteTA.js )?

At any rate, I'm be interested in any thoughts or comments from folks who
use LanguageConverter regularly.
  --scott

-- 
(http://cscott.net)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-i18n/attachments/20170711/88d4ba4f/attachment.html>