Marcus Buck wrote:
> Mediawiki provides no real support for truly multilingual wikis at all.
> Despite the fact that the prominent multilingual wikis Commons and Meta
> are around since 2004 and 2001 respectively. Making Mediawiki truly
> multilingual is a heavy task. There are at least a dozen things that
> come up in my mind where Mediawiki sucks multilinguality-wise. But a
> simple first starting step would be to create a global variable like
> "$wgMultilingualWiki = true/false" and if it is set to true the content
> language will automatically be set to the language set in the
> preferences. That will remove several problems like the wrong tab order
> for RTL languages or the fact that {{PLURAL: }} doesn't work correctly
> for any language with a different plural structure than English.
I was going to suggest more or less the same thing. Although I don't
think blindly setting $wgContLang = $wgLang is really a good idea -- too
many things would break if we did that.
(For example, {{PLURAL:}} really _has_ to be parsed according to the
language the page/message is written for, since the meaning of the
params varies between languages. What making {{PLURAL:}} useful in
multilingual page content really needs is a syntax for specifying the
intended language inline. Anyone interested in trying that might want
to note that there's a (currently incomplete) ParserFunctions-based
reimplementation at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Plural
which tries to do just that.)
It would be better to just look for spots (like LTR/RTL rendering) where
that can be safely done and sprinkle them with lines like:
global $wgMultilingual, $wgLang, $wgContLang;
$lang = $wgMultilingual ? $wgLang : $wgContLang;
Alternatively, I suppose we could introduce a new global -- say,
$wgInterfaceLang -- which could be set to equal either $wgLang or
$wgContLang in Setup.php.
--
Ilmari Karonen
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