Language issues

After the introduction of the LocalisationUpdate extension on the Wikimedia projects, we are now much better positioned to evaluate the issues that exist in the MediaWiki environment for your language. The issues reported on this page will all be evaluated.

There are many types of problems that may exist with the support for your language. When the problem is with the localisation for your language, we ask you to go to translatewiki.net and complete or improve the localisation there.

When the problem has nothing to do with localisation, for instance characters do not show properly, the behaviour of the software is not as you would expect, then this is the place where we want to hear from you. They can also be things that "have always been that way but should be different". For instance it makes sense when the sidebar for someone who has an English user interface is always on the left.

Please give each separate issue for your language a heading under your language.

Arabic

It would be good if the sidebar for Arabic is always on the right

Commons

The preferences for Arabic on Commons are all at the wrong place.. they should look as well organised as they do for English.

Ripuarian / Kölsch

Currently, there is only one Ripuarian variant localization, using Kölsch (Colognian), both the variant having the most speaker, and being the central most variant. --Purodha Blissenbach 23:18, 30 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Allow correct language tagging everywhere

We do not translate some English technical terms. These need to be enclosed in html markup specifying the correct language, such as in <i lang="en" xml:lang="en">regular expression</i>, but this kind of markup is not working, or rendered incorrectly, in quite many messages and contexts. See also mw:Internationalisation#Expect_untranslated_words. --Purodha Blissenbach 23:18, 30 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

GENDER and t/v distinctions

It would be nice to have 5 GENDER variations:

grammatical masculine and natural male
natural female, colloquial, standard, close
gender unknown
grammatical feminine and natural female, special, respectful, distanced
grammatical neuter

Most localized messages already have all five cases, but software is currently using only three of them. See also http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Gender and http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Talk:Gender --Purodha Blissenbach 23:18, 30 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Message lengths and layout

Many translated messages are longer than their English counterparts. They do not always fit in the layouts. Especially the Special:Preferences page looks ugly since its strange layout forces loads of bewildering line breaks. See also mw: Internationalisation#Messages_are_usually_longer_than_you_think.21

Localizable messages following inputs are missing

There should always be localizeable messages following input fields in forms, so as to allow specifying units, or ", please", or explanations, especially in the Special:Preferences page. See also mw:Internationalisation#Have_message_elements_before_and_after_input_fields --Purodha Blissenbach 23:18, 30 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]