[Translators-l] Fwd: Dialects like "en-gb" on MediaWiki extensions

[Casey Brown]

Hey Yannis,

The discussion list for the localization of the MediaWiki software is
actually MediaWiki-i18n, so I've forwarded your e-mail to that list.
I've also included Guillaume Paumier and Neil Kandalgaonkar on this
e-mail, since they're the ones who made the Upload Wizard. :-)

Thanks for reporting the issues you encountered!

Casey


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Yannis A. <yannanth at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 7:08 PM
Subject: [Translators-l] Dialects like "en-gb" on MediaWiki extensions
To: translators-l at lists.wikimedia.org


I’m not sure if this is the right place to write about this, but
there’s something of the problem with the language detection (sorry, I
don’t know the technical terms) module of several MediaWiki extensions
and templates, such as the newly-released Wikimedia Commons Upload
Wizard and... many templates!

For example, when I go over to the Upload Wizard for testing and
casual uploading, there's a banner at the top telling me that the
language was not found and that it “defaulted back to English”.

Obviously, this would not be a problem with a speaker of British
English, but it could potentially be a problem in all sorts of
frameworks with someone who picked a language code like “arz”—Egyptian
Arabic, which would predictably default to English even though a
Standard Arabic version of the tutorial is available, which the
average arz speaker would definitely be more familiar with!

The problem, therefore, is how MediaWiki handles dialects as separate
languages, and if it’s not fixed now, it could be a much bigger
problem as the usability initiative affects more and more components
of the website. Could some programmer fix this? I don't have the first
clue about how PHP works...
(sorry for the long post, by the way)

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-- 
Casey Brown
Cbrown1023