Last modified: 2014-09-24 03:55:56 UTC
Currently old message keys use underscores and newer ones use hyphens. This has resulted in a horrible mix of underscores in some messages and hyphens in others, and in some extreme cases, both underscores and hyphens appearing in the same message. This is a problem for both developers and end users, because if the name cannot be remembered or predicted (unlike words, _ vs - is a very difficult distinction to remember), it becomes much more difficult to work with the messages. To fix this, the message keys need to be updated in the files in which they're called (Interwiki.php and Interwiki_body.php), as well as in all the i18n files, which is a lot. Some sort of script that could be run on update (by maintenance/update.php) to move any on-wiki changes to the default messages would also probably be needed.
This sort of thing seems like it would have come up before - have any of the conversion steps been automated?
Trying to fix message names en masse brings lot of disruption with little benefit. Don't forget that these messages can be customized on wiki as well as referred in various places with {{int:}}. Unless you (or anyone else) device an intelligent way of doing this (like rewriting message keys on the fly for duration of the deprecation period; doing proper announcements to *all* MediaWiki users) I suggest not fixing this.
Long-standing practice is not to touch message keys unless there are compelling reasons and concrete benefits; closing to reflect current status, may change of course. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Localisation#Changing_existing_messages
Long-standing practice is irrelevant. This is both poor coding practice and poor usability; by that logic there's no reason to make new ones consistent with each other either. This affects developers primarily because we'll be the ones updating the usage and contents of the messages, but end users may also run into trouble when they try to follow an apparent pattern when updating messages. Fortunately to this discussion, we don't have to worry about them predicting message names because that's basically impossible anyway due to a lack of any meaningful standards.
(In reply to Niklas Laxström from comment #2) > Trying to fix message names en masse brings lot of disruption with little > benefit. Don't forget that these messages can be customized on wiki as well > as referred in various places with {{int:}}. But keys get deleted all the time. A primary example is when they get moved into extensions and/or no longer shipped with core. On the development end this is exactly why it's recommended for everything to have its own messages, and on the wiki end, users who reuse existing messages simply run that risk in general. > Unless you (or anyone else) device an intelligent way of doing this (like > rewriting message keys on the fly for duration of the deprecation period; > doing proper announcements to *all* MediaWiki users) I suggest not fixing > this. A script could be fairly easily written to do everything I described. The only issue would be possible collisions with twn.
Okay, yeah, you're right. It's just bloody horrible.
