When the Vector skin became available, I tried it on my home wiki, pt.wikipedia, and noticed that a great deal of its interface was still in English. So I went to translatewiki.net and translated the remaining strings to Portuguese. Then I waited, and waited.. and I am waiting until today, and the skin still has the English strings on it. It's been almost a month.
This is bad for several reasons. On this specific context, it means that non-English users of the Vector skin, which is supposed to increase usability, will actually have potentially more trouble using it simply because it is using a foreign language. On a more general stance, this is also bad for translators, since we don't have as much motivation to contribute when our translations lay unused for so much time. It's exactly one of the arguments that was used a lot to oppose the FlaggedRevisions extension: the immediacy of the edits going live is what makes wikis so compelling. (disclaimer: I'm actualy in favor of flagged revs; I would trade some immediacy for more stability. But not if the delay means a month!) It's also bad for MediaWiki in general, since the expansion of its language support grows in a much slower pace. I understand why it was chosen not to always run bleeding edge versions of the software on the live Wikimedia wikis. But the LocalisationUpdate was created precisely as a workaround to this, i.e, to allow updating the localisation without needing to update the software. So my question is: why is it not enabled yet on most Wikimedia wikis? _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
