What’s Special about myLanguage?
Increasingly, UserBase pages are beginning to use Special:myLanguage in links, so what is special about that? Well, it depends whether you are a reader or a translator.
For readers, it will mean that increasingly they will be taken to pages in their own language. The way it works is that it is aware of the language that you set in your preferences as your root language – that is myLanguage. If you click on a link it checks to see if there is a page available in that language, and if there is, that page is displayed. If no page exists, the English one is displayed instead. Of course, it only works for those pages that are within our new translation system, so we do need help to enable more of those pages, whether by fresh translations or by copy-and-paste from the old ones.
What’s advantage to translators? Simply that they no longer have to check for the existence of translated pages before deciding how to define the link. Using Special:myLanguage means that the moment a suitably translated page is available, it will be displayed from the link. That’s a time-saver.
It will take time to get all pages to take advantage of this, but it’s certainly a job worth doing, and one that you can help with in the odd hours when you need a change from your usual work.
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Another step completed into making KDE’s wikis much more professional!
And much more to come! Watch this space!
1. Shouldn’t be better to run a script against the database to convert the old link to special?
2. Shouldn’t myLanguage be used by default by every link?
If the myLanguage page exists the user gets what he wanted.
Otherwise he will get the usual page.
Great work btw 🙂
[quote]1. Shouldn’t be better to run a script against the database to convert the old link to special?
2. Shouldn’t myLanguage be used by default by every link?
If the myLanguage page exists the user gets what he wanted.
Otherwise he will get the usual page.[/quote]
Ideally, yes, it should be on every link, but I don’t have the skills to write such a script, even if that’s possible, and running scripts against the database would probably not be a good idea anyway. We’re getting there. More pages are being added every day. But we do need more contributors – and they don’t have to be able to spend huge amounts of time on it.