On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 6:45 PM, Skyring <[email protected]> wrote: > So. Are we an international project, paying appropriate attention to > internationalising our product, or are we a battleground of cultural > imperialism?
We're a battleground of cultural imperialism, of course … even if we shouldn't be. It does bother me, though, that one of the few, if imperfect, ways we had of presenting information in the way the reader preferred - I refer of course to our date formatting preferences - is being neutered because the implementation was poor, rather than improved. The problems with it were twofold; firstly, that for un-logged-in users, it displayed a mishmash of styles that often ended up the worst possible solution, and secondly that it required wikilinks, which offended people who have an aversion to excess links in articles. I have a strong feeling that it was actually the second reason that was the real driving force behind the delinking; I felt a sense of glee from partisans when they discovered that date preferences only worked for logged-in users and thus most of the readership didn't get pretty dates. It gave them a nice big club to use in debate to get what they wanted, which was prettier articles from their point of view. Better would have been fixing it to work better. Not leaving links in the HTML. Sensible defaults for non-logged-in users; most modern browsers send information on the user's language preference, including UK versus US; how much such preferences are accurately set I'm not sure, but it's there. -Matt _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
