Meta:Babel/Archives/2013-05

WikiLang demo on Meta

The demo of the proposed WikiLang project has been started here on Meta. Everyone is welcome to contribute or comment (on Talk:WikiLang). PiRSquared17 (talk) 01:48, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Hah, that's cool! Thank you, PiR17. –SJ talk  14:37, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Great job now, User: Meta Wiki Welcome

I'm so proud that you're here. In Wikipedia, I never saw that nice present from you! (Son Phan) (talk) (UTC) 2:05 5 May 2013

Please solve ca.wikipedia.org scandal

Discussed at Wikimedia Forum#Please solve ca.wikipedia.org scandal. --Stefan2 (talk) 15:34, 25 May 2013 (UTC)
In red, hatred Catalonian nationalism that bans spanish flags on catalonian wikipedia Catalan speakers that know the Kingdom of Spain, and its State exists Please solve future ca.wikipedia.org scandal, where a few extreme nationalists are shamefully banning Spanish flag, substituting by the local flag in the region of Catalonia. So, hilarious situations arise as replacing the flag of Spain by the local flag of Catalunya region, suggesting that the Kingdom of Spain did not exist at the 1888 Barcelona International Exposition or that lie: Spain did not participate in the Olympic Games of 1992, also censoring Spanish Olympic Committee to shamefully ban the Spanish flag in that list. Examples: http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposici%C3%B3_Universal_de_Barcelona_(1888) "Preceeded by Flag:Australia - Flag:Sovereign Catalonian State Succeeded by Flaf:France" http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocs_Ol%C3%ADmpics Olympic Games hosts: 1988 Seoul (Korean State Flag) 1992 (Catalonian local region Flag) 1996 Atlanta (USA Flag) It's normal, extreme nationalism is excited using Wikipedia to invent history, that also goes to the extreme right or the extreme left -Why these people do not use their own wiki to invent their own stories they invented?-, but there is something a person can not to invent: the history. Like it or not, the history takes us we can not invent. I (and the historians) hope you fix solution to this scandal, as this shameful ban of Spanish flags, as well as being full of hatred, goes against all historical encyclopedic accuracy, and goes against what Spanish and American municipalities, institutions, organizations and schools want to give to their children. Spain exists in 1888, in 1992, and Today, and either wikipedia will not change history under dark interests. Sorry for my bad english. Regards. ca.wikipedia.org is a language project and some languages are so pure that they don't accept any words from another language. But apart of being a language project it is also a wikipedia project and it should follow also the wikipedia rules. But still it has to follow the local rules and this needs to be solved locally. And not by historians or stewards. Thanks for bring it to my attention. Carsrac (talk) 09:51, 25 May 2013 (UTC)

Comparing Arabic Words to Hebrew's

Hello,

I am a native Hebrew speaker with some fair knowledge of Arabic.

I am curretnly engaged in a PERSONAL project of comparing VOCABULARY between the 2 languages & am wondering if my work may be revelvant/ useflu to your (this Wikimedia) wesbite & if its input can be incorporated in it. Ideally, it should be ALPHABETICALLY!

I am NOT Wiki-technically inclined-so, in case of relevance, I'd need someone's help guiding me how to do things...

I'd appreciate an early response on it & look forward to it :)

Kind thanks,

Avi

Welcome! I do not think that it would be appropriate to host such a list on this Wiki (the Meta wiki) (just so you know, Wikimedia is the organization that runs Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Meta, etc.). However, such information could well have a place on a relevant Wikipedia article, in a Wikibook, or at Wiktionary.

Regarding not being wiki-technically inclined - wikis are designed to be (relatively) easy to edit and contribute to. And with the edit bar at the top of the edit box, that should simplify it a bit. If you start, it shouldn't be too hard to learn. If you are interested, you could read this editing tutorial on Wikipedia. Also, if you have any questions about anything in specific, you could ask me at my talk page, and some other Wikimedians would also doubtless be happy to help you. Gottistgut (talk) 10:37, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia is also not the appropriate place for these personal researches and experimentations. You could think about Wiktionnary to host these terminological lists but Wiktionnary is not intended to compare languages and it works differently than a simple list of terms and requires more data.

So try first tour work in Wikibooks, and if some community interest emerges that would create an interesting resource for use in Wiktionnary, it will be done in appropriate time. verdy_p (talk) 01:40, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

resolution info template

Is there any way to make the {{resolution info/Affcom}} template translatable along with the pages it is embedded into? --Bence (talk) 11:48, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

(For the record the template is here: Template:Resolution info/AffCom). To be seen, for now I encountered bugzilla:48869. --MF-W 18:58, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

Replied on bugzilla. The only things in the switch statement that should be translated anyway are "Resolution", "passed", and "failed". Don't translate switch arguments, they won't work the same way in different languages. PiRSquared17 (talk) 19:23, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

I facepalm myself for filing that bug. – I think this page could very well be marked for translation, it's just that Resolution {{#switch:{{{status}}}|yes|passed|accepted=passed|rejected|no|failed|not accepted=failed|unknown|#default={{{status}}}}} with {{{yes}}} votes in favor{{#if:{{{no|}}}|, {{{no}}} votes against|}}{{#if:{{{abstention|}}}|, {{{abstention}}} abstentions|}}{{#if:{{{noncast|}}}|, {{{noncast}}} votes not cast|}} on {{{date}}}. is terrible to translate. But it's of course possible to do it if you really put this in one message, so that the sentence can be arranged as needed for translations. --MF-W 19:32, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, that's not great. Should I try to modify it to make it more "translator-friendly", or is it OK? The {{{status}}} argument won't work with translation nicely... PiRSquared17 (talk) 19:51, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks guys. In practice the status part is not modified as much as would be suggested by the template, so feel free to simplify. –Bence (talk) 20:08, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

New account creation and login

After months of testing, we're finally ready to enable the new designs for account creation and login, and did so a few hours ago. If you're interested in the background, there is documentation about why we did this and how we tested it. (I previously posted about it here.)

As we announced on the blog a while back, if you see any lingering translation issues, please either fix them on translatewiki.net (where the volunteer translation for software is done) or speak up here. I did some MediaWiki namespace changes to fix up the look for Meta already.

Many thanks, Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 02:02, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

The blue and green buttons are really jarring. I may switch them back to look like standard user interface buttons (i.e., unstyled). --MZMcBride (talk) 02:05, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

In Vector, if you choose a language other than English, it links to Meta:Username policy. Do we need to make a username policy? PiRSquared17 (talk) 02:08, 30 May 2013 (UTC) seems fixed now, sorry for the triple post. PiRSquared17 (talk) 02:11, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Createacct-helpusername, hrmmmm. This seems like a wonky default. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:12, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Steven's edit to that page might fix it for English, but what about other languages, like French? PiRSquared17 (talk) 02:17, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

You were the one to strike your comment; I was the one to point out the default state of the form (i.e., outputting a help me choose link by default) is probably wrong. ;-) --MZMcBride (talk) 02:27, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Technically, the default state of the form in core is that this and a few other messages are blank. Since the need for a username policy or help link is fairly Wikimedia-specific, the text is inserted via Extension:WikimediaMessages. To answer PiRSquared's localization question: you can fix this by creating the message in its own langcode here. You can see an example of this on Chinese Wikipedia (which supports a bunch of dialects). MZ: there is no easy way to please everyone on this front, and local customization has been pretty much a requirement. Some wikis that are key really want and need some mention of their username policy, like Wikipedia in many languages. Others don't. Either someone has to go around inserting it for those that do want it, or someone has to go around removing/customizing for those that don't. Either way, work is involved. Considering I've been the one doing most of that work so far, I don't think it's such a bad deal. I'm happy to fix up other languages here on Meta too. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 03:52, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Why is the style of UserLogin in Monobook different from that in Vector? PiRSquared17 (talk) 02:09, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

bugzilla:47698 --MZMcBride (talk) 02:12, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

• Thanks for you work on this, Steven. I was wondering if perhaps MediaWiki:Captchahelp-text should be translated in to other languages to help users that don't speak English. 64.40.54.14 02:40, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
  • That special page is actually created by the extension that creates our CAPTCHA. Normally it is localized in the language of the wiki at hand, but isn't quite set up to handle multilingual wikis like Meta, to my knowledge. The best solution would probably be to create a normal wiki page here on Meta, and have that translated, which isn't too hard. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 03:42, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Steven. I created Meta:Captcha help and slapped a translation template on it as a starting point. But I'm no expert and don't really know what I'm doing. Perhaps somebody could move it to a better name and include a link to it in MediaWiki:Captchahelp-text as I can't edit interface pages. 64.40.54.14 04:37, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

I've linked that MediaWiki message to it now. I think you constructed that page just fine. Thanks for your help, Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 04:51, 30 May 2013 (UTC)