Last modified: 2014-02-12 23:45:40 UTC
This request for enhancement results from a discussion with Hcatlin (see URL). There seems to exist a similar pending issue with chinese languages. Both can be resolved with more subdomains. The request can be stated thus: In MediaWiki's interface, there are two variants of portuguese: Portuguese (pt) and Portuguese (Brazil) (pt-br). Users can set their MediaWiki interface language to the most appropriate. In Wikipedia proper, there is a single Wikipedia for the portuguese language, so the articles are in a mix of pt and pt-br. Now, it's not clear to me from pt.m.wikipedia.org how users would go about setting the interface language, but I guess it results from the URL they access. If that is so, in principle, "pt" users (i.e. those who set their interface language in MediaWiki to "pt") should access pt.m.wikipedia.org and get the "pt" buttons and messages and the articles from pt.wikipedia.org. The "pt-br" users should access pt-br.m.wikipedia.org and get the "pt-br" buttons and messages and the articles from the same pt.wikipedia.org. If we direct users to the mobile version of wikipedia from within wikipedia itself, then users who have set their interface language to "pt" would be directed to pt.m.wikipedia.org and those that set their interface language to "pt-br" would be directed to pt-br.m.wikipedia.org. If we are unable to examine the interface language and direct users to the appropriate one, then both links should be presented: pt.m.wikipedia.org and pt-br.m.wikipedia.org and let users choose the appropriate one. Note: According to Hcatlin, it does appear that one can tell what the user's UserLanguage is via javascript: wgUserLanguage="pt-br", wgContentLanguage="pt", but similar functionality (finding the user lang) seems to already be available in one of the extensions installed at www.translatewiki.net through <nowiki><tt>{{UILANGCODE}} </tt></nowiki> (sorry, can't figure out which extension).
Note that these are not variants proper. Variants are cases in which we autoconvert everything (including the content) from one variant of a language to another. Chinese (different scripts) and Serbian (Latin <-> Cyrillic) have this variant autoconversion, but there's no such thing for pt <-> pt-br. The important observation is that variant conversion usually converts between scripts.
Tweaked the name to more accurate define the issue: "different languages" => "different interface languages". Other examples of this are de-formal/de (and to a lesser extent, de-at/de-ch), but not the Chinese languages (those are different scripts which can just be converted).
(In reply to comment #1) > Chinese (different scripts) and Serbian (Latin <-> Cyrillic) have > this variant autoconversion, but there's no such thing for pt <-> pt-br. Actually there is: http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Esplanada/propostas/Conversor_de_idiomas_para_as_variantes_do_portugu%C3%AAs_%2830mai2010%29/PHP It is just a matter of some developer adding the corresponding code to a test wiki where the Portuguese comunity could test it in order to decide if they want or not the feature enabled on Portuguese wikipedia. This was proposed on http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Esplanada/propostas/Conversor_de_idiomas_para_as_variantes_do_portugu%C3%AAs_%2830mai2010%29 and discussed in its talk page. There are examples of Conversion tables at http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Esplanada/propostas/Conversor_de_idiomas_para_as_variantes_do_portugu%C3%AAs_%2830mai2010%29/MediaWiki:Conversiontable/pt-pt and http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Esplanada/propostas/Conversor_de_idiomas_para_as_variantes_do_portugu%C3%AAs_%2830mai2010%29/MediaWiki:Conversiontable/pt-br Unfortunatelly my previous question wasn't answered yet: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2010-August/048809.html
Created bug 26121 for that.
*** Bug 22519 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 38101 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This was marked as a duplicate of bug 38101 which is marked as RESOLVED FIXED so I guess this 3 year old bug has been fixed? \o/ ?