Meta:Requests for comment/Multi-lang meta user page

The following request for comments is closed. No consensus for proposed action.

Statement of the issue edit

As a non-locally-exist user page fallback to meta user page, I hope to have the ability to set different meta page for different language projects; which let us have one unified page for each language group wikis on meta, instead of just English. So if users are accessing from French Wikisource of a user does not have a local user page, they see the French version instead of English version, which save us a lot of trouble of creating different pages for different projects of the same language group. Viztor (talk) 00:41, 4 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comments edit

  • The header and footer of the Babel extension's template don't change. I'm not quite sure why on that; I'd need to look at it.
  • If you have the {{Userpage}} template on your userpage, there is always an English translation of it at the bottom. That's a feature, not a bug.
  • For any template on your userpage (including that one), if there isn't a version of the template in your user language, the template will show default. But you have to edit the template for that, not the userpage.
StevenJ81 (talk) 14:26, 9 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
So here's where I think there is some confusion/misunderstanding. If you do this as some of us have suggested by using {{#switch: {{int:lang}}}}, the language changes according to the language that the user has set, not the language of the wiki. If you are suggesting that you want the page to appear in, for example, French, whenever the project language is French (rather than the user language), it doesn't do that.
But here's why that usually doesn't matter. For an IP user on the project, the user language is always the project language, by default. For a registered user, there are three possibilities:
  • User has set a global interface language s/he wants. In that case, the user sees that language, which is one s/he knows. That's fine; that's what s/he wants.
  • User has set a local interface language for that project, overriding the default. That's also fine (see above).
  • User has not set an override for the project, so sees the page in the language of the project (if available). That's what the proposer is looking for.
End result: If the user wants a different language, user is entitled to have it. If not, the language of the local wiki is the default.
The only situation missing is the one where the user page is not fully defined and available in the language of the project. That gets tricky. Plain text would have to be translated by each user. Templates will appear in the language of the project if they've been properly set up for that language. But when they're not, some will then go to the fallback language to the project, others directly to English, depending on how they're coded. My global user page on the Arpitan Wikipedia includes templates that render in French and templates that render in English. Could we try to set up all templates so that they always render down the fallback language cascade? I suppose. If we were doing it from scratch now, we surely would want to do that. But is it worth redoing the many templates already set up in a different way? I just don't see it. StevenJ81 (talk) 21:15, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]