Multimedia:Multilingual support

User-friendly language setting

Possible solutions:

• easy: use lang of the SUL'd user's home wiki as default language in preferences
• harder: global language setting (overridden by local specific settings)
• and in any case, add the language selector to the sign up page on multilingual wikis like Commons, so that users don't need to go in their preferences and change the language as soon as they register.
• Make the info public? in order to make it easier for other people to communicate with the user

Sign up

Related bugs:

• 5309 Localize captcha images
• bugzilla:6466: Enable login language selection links on Commons, Meta, MediaWiki, and WikiVersity.org

  See also rev:14901 (language selector bar)

Multilingual communication

Communication between users is difficult on multilingual sites like Commons; people have to communicate using auto-translated templates.

Multilingual categories

Allow translations of categories

• see if this can be done as a larger overhaul of the interwiki system (bugzilla:11423)
• talk with Duesentrieb, Siebrand and perhaps interwiki bot owners
• see also Multilingual MediaWiki

Better language picker

Unlike just about every website on the planet, we have a need to allow quick switching between over 356 languages or dialects, sometimes on the same page.

Wikimedia's current solution is to present a menu of 356 choices to scroll through, using the name of the language in the language, ordered by ISO code.

The problem cannot be solved by any ordering, as that will always have languages that are harder to find. It is also sub-optimal to mix code pages, listing devanagari alongside roman letters, since there is no obvious order.

So we want to do away with a scrolling menu altogether. We want to use a text input that auto-completes with suggestions, much like the search box today. However, this auto-completion also knows about all the translations we have for all language names as well as their ISO codes. So to get to German, you could type de for its ISO code or Deutsch. You could also type ge which would give you "de - Deutsch (German)" among its choices, or even the Chinese name for German. We avoid the N**2 problem since if we do not have a translation for a particular language name in a particular language, that simply doesn't become part of the choices offered.

Other

Related bugs:

• bugzilla:1495: Undefined messages in user language don't fall back to MediaWiki: customizations

  Not exactly sure if the problem still exists

• bugzilla:8287: Enable multilingual extension in Commons

  Probably not the best way to handle this

• bugzilla:4125 Preserve ?uselang=xx / &uselang=xx during sessions