Topic on User talk:Amire80

Over at User:AKlapper (WMF)#Guidance for for introducing a standard set of mediawiki: ns pages for sister wikis, I was asking naive questions on the process for looking to systematically getting MW: ns messages where the Wikisources have a level of common urls in the Sidebar. One to get some defaults in place just to make it easier, and then to get the translations in place for message names. AK indicates that it sits as a language-type matter, so I thought of you, especially as coding is something that I wish to avoid.

Do you see that this could sit under the coordination of the Language team if the Wikisources are able to agree to a common set of terms/urls? Thanks.

I don't see how this is "a language-type matter". In my understanding anyone interested in this could coordinate and reach out to communities, and anyone interested in this could volunteer to follow Gerrit instructions and propose a patch.

I see it as a language-type matter for the Wikisources as this is something that can already be done now for the wikisources through Sidebar and as said numbers already have this specific set of links in the sidebar. I am hoping that what we can offer the WS community is a range of default urls they can easily implemented in their sidebars, AND when they go to another WS they will be able to see those links in their language. I am not looking to offer new functionality, just repeating url components and corresponding labels.

Heh, a very curious question.

It's a huge topic, but very briefly:

Andre, while it's not exactly a language issue, in practice, the implementation of the sidebar does involve system messages, so it is a good idea to involve the Language team in finding a good way to make them more robust and portable.

A quick and simple solution is probably something like this:

• Discuss with people from other Wikisource editions what do they want in the sidebar.
• Once you arrive at an agreement for at least a few of them, write the common sidebar code. By "code" I mean something like s:en:MediaWiki:Sidebar, so it's something with which you are already familiar.
• Once it's done, it can probably be added as a message in Extension:WikimediaMessages. If you don't want to go deeply into Gerrit, I can do it for you.
• Once it's merged, it will be possible to translate it on translatewiki.net, and after it's translated, it will be auto-deployed to all the languages. Doing this is more robust than managing a local MediaWiki:Sidebar in each wiki site.
• So far, so good, but I'm less sure about the next part: Each language will have to get rid of its local MediaWiki:Sidebar (this is easy—just delete the page) and to enable the sidebar code from WikimediaMessages. I'm not quite sure how to do this. Maybe User:Nikerabbit will have an idea. And maybe he'll suggest scrapping this whole plan, and doing something else ;)

In the longer term, I envision proper product management work around the sidebar: Analyzing its usability, design, clicks frequency, customization options, and so on. But the naïve little plan above can be a first step.