Topic on Project:Support desk

Localized namespaces have stopped working in a MediaWiki installation: they are not translated into localized links, and localized links do not lead to the special pages. For example, for language "De", the entry "Kategorien" (categories) under special pages links to "Special:Categories" rather than to "Special:Kategorien". Also, opening the page "http://.../wiki/Special:Kategorien" gives "Spezialseite nicht vorhanden" (nosuchspecialpage: No such special page). The problem occurs both for the wiki's configured language in LocalSettings (Greek - El), and for a user-configured language (Deutsch - De) through user preferences.

I noticed this problem after upgrading from MediaWiki 1.19.3 to 1.24.0.

These are the software versions used: MediaWiki 1.24.0, PHP 5.3.5 (apache2handler), MySQL 5.1.55-log.

Could you provide a link to your wiki?

I don't recall localized links like this working (and I remember filing a feature request for them them a few years ago). Sure, for a German wiki, you would get special page names in German and English Special page names would work, but German page names wouldn't work on an English wiki.

The wiki in question is configured to run in Greek. I am sure localized namespaces were working, because now the wiki in question is full of dead links, which used to work. You can also see localized namespaces working in the special pages of the German Wikipedia. In the German Wikipedia all special page links are in German, whereas in the corresponding page of the wiki in question the links are in English, rather than in Greek.

Ah, I misunderstood what you meant. This is definitely a bug, but maybe there is some configuration that is needed. Pinging User:Amire80 to see if he has ideas.

Opened a bug: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T78794

I got a fresh wiki installation on another host to work correctly with a copy of the original wiki's database and a fresh version of LocalSettings.php created by the maintenance/install.php script (called from a Puppet module). The corresponding software versions are as follows: MediaWiki 1.24.0, PHP 5.4.35-0+deb7u2 (apache2handler), MySQL 5.5.40-0+wheezy1.

Note that the settings created had $wgDBmysql5 = true; (although the documentation claims it is false by default), which caused an "Illegal mix of collations" database error. The error was rectified by setting $wgDBmysql5 = false in LocalSettings.php to mirror the setting in the original wiki.

Thanks for the update. I've updated phabricator with your comment.