Sunday, February 12, 2012

#Localisation for #LUA scripts?

In order to improve the scripting in MediaWiki, it will become possible to add LUA code. Many of the existing templates are not really examples of readability or performance and, in addition to this many templates have been copied to many other wikis.

Changing these templates, making them useful in other languages is quite a job.and it requires knowledge of the scripting language(s) involved and obviously the language the script(s) that need supporting.

At translatewiki.net a request has been made to use messages for templates that are used on many projects. Templates like "done", "not done", "support", "oppose" and "neutral"are the ones suggested. It is one of those suggestions that gets a lot of sympathy from the translatewiki community.

Localising the messages and getting them to every project is a problem we have a solution for. Making sure that templates exist and remain on the latest version will need some thought. With the introduction of LUA imminent, this is an opportune moment to give the distribution of templates some thought.

Doing this by hand is already hard if not impossible. With Wikipedia going strongly towards 300 projects, it would be great when the support in the many languages of our communities can already start in the Incubator.
Thanks,
     GerardM

1 comment:

Bawolff said...

More generally, third parties re-users of MediaWiki, often want the Wikipedia style templates, this might be an opportunity to provide a library of common templates to download.