Thread:Project:Support desk/How can I create both left-to-right and right-to-left pages in MediaWiki?

(Apologies for what may be a simple question, but zillions of searches for "bidi" and "right-to-left languages" have just left me more confused than before.)

MediaWiki 	1.21.1 PHP 	5.3.24 (cgi-fcgi) MySQL 	5.0.96-log http://horawiki.org/

I would like users of my wiki to be able to contribute pages in both LTR and RTL languages, specifically English and Hebrew. I seem to have the interface working correctly per-language (I'm using the Universal Language Selector extension) but things don't work in content pages. How do I tell MediaWiki that a content page is RTL rather than LTR?

For example, I have pages http://horawiki.org/page/Welcome_to_HoraWiki! and http://horawiki.org/page/%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%9B%D7%99%D7%9D_%D7%94%D7%91%D7%90%D7%99%D7%9D_%D7%9C%D7%94%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%95%D7%99%D7%A7%D7%99 which are more-or-less translations of each other. The latter page, however, displays generally as LTR---notice that everything is crammed against the left margin, not the right margin.

On the other hand, when I look at the page in the WikiEditor "Preview" tab (after edit and before publish) everything looks great. Indeed, I can (mostly) use directional markers amp-lrm-; and amp-rlm-; to get the punctuation correct. (Still struggling with references, but that might work too.) How come the previewer shows the page correctly, but in the wiki it still looks wrong?

From the documentation, it looks like I might need to set the "PageContentLanguage" or the like. But I can find only hooks and so forth to do this---how does a user set it for a page he is creating?

Any help greatly appreciated.