Last modified: 2013-06-24 16:18:50 UTC
New in 1.17! but not really a blocker or otherwise important. When viewing the uncustomized (aka non-created) page in mediawiki namespace for a message that defaults to the empty string, its treated as if there is no such message. to reproduce: *Go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:cite_reference_link_suffix&action=edit (as a normal user without editinterface rights) This is a message that uses the default, and that default is ''. *Behaviour seen: no text box to view source. Treated as if there is no such message. Additionally, links to that page are red (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Cite_messages ). *Expected behaviour. Be treated like a normal message that has content by default and hasn't been customized by the wiki. For example, like http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:cite_reference_link_prefix&action=edit (although that might not be best example, as there's talk of killing that message). Additionally, links to the message should be blue, since it "exists" (sort of anyhow). Exists and is empty, should be treated like exists and has content, not as if there was no such message.
Brian, can you provide a reason why you would need this, or how you could benefit from getting this done? Niklas and I discussed this, and we do not see any added benefit to the current behaviour.
(In reply to comment #1) > Brian, can you provide a reason why you would need this, or how you could > benefit from getting this done? Niklas and I discussed this, and we do not see > any added benefit to the current behaviour. Its just inconsistent behaviour. It doesn't cause any problems other then being unexpected. We do all sorts of special things to make mediawiki ns pages appear to exist even when they don't (in the db), and its inconsistent not to have an empty string message appear to not exist when it has a key in the i18n file and really does exist. In the very worst case, this caused mild confusion when reading the old Extension:Cite docs on Wikipedia that linked to various messages used by Extension:Cite. These docs were outdated, and some of the messages it mentioned were long since removed from the extension (and appeared as red links). It looked like some of the still functioning messages were no longer part of the extension because they linked to red, when really they were still part of the extension (but the empty string by default).
Like bug 13037?
(In reply to comment #3) > Like bug 13037? I think that's a separate bug.
Still current even after bug 14176.
