Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:06:06 UTC
On the Commons, {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} displays with a comma as the numeric separator: 29,949. That's fine for English, but Spanish wants to use . and other languages might use other separators. MediaWiki currently has a very inflexible support for different separators in a few cases. For example, [[MediaWiki:Sitestatstext]] takes variable $2 which is NUMBEROFARTICLES with the localized separator. A more flexible solution would be if {{NUMBEROFARTICLES|.}} did the obvious thing (the variable acts like a template, and uses the first argument as the separator). Then we could localize that number in places that MediaWiki hasn't thought of, for example the Spanish version of the Main Page, [[Commons:Portada]]. Obviously the same issue applies to all other numeric variables.
On the special page: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics we use $wgLang which can be the user prefered language, that's why the numbers are correctly formatted. But {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} in an article or in a template is formatted using $wgContLang which is the site language for content. There is only one such language which is english for commons. There is no real way to fix this issue :/
What's wrong with my proposed solution, taking the separator as a parameter? That is certainly within the realm of possibility, whether or not it is feasible in the current MediaWiki code.
To close wiht a "WONTFIX" is not a good solution. There are many solutions: the proposed by David or i.e. to force the variable to use the language defined in a parameter, instead the predetermined by $wgContLang {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} uses the $wgContLang localization {{NUMBEROFARTICLES|es}} (or {{NUMBEROFARTICLES/es}}) uses the spanish localization {{NUMBEROFARTICLES|en}} uses the english localization
