Jump to content

Requests for comment/Easier access to "pagelang" right (Special:PageLanguage)

Add links
From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

This is a subpage; for more information, see the Requests for comments page.

Copied from Easier access to "pagelang" right (Special:PageLanguage) (Community Wishlist/W568).

Currently, pagelang right is restricted to admins, translation admins, and Wishlist managers. So when an ordinary editor creates a page, it just defaults to English.

This is bad for Web accessibility. WCAG 2.1 SC 3.1.1 Language of Page (Level A): "The default human language of each web page can be programmatically determined." WCAG 2.1 SC 3.1.2 Language of Parts (Level AA): "The human language of each passage or phrase in the content can be programmatically determined[...]" This affects functionalities including speech synthesizers, text rendering, and auto-translate prompts. For example, screen readers might read the foreign texts aloud using English phonetic rules[1].

This also blocks LanguageConverter for pluricentric languages or languages with multiple writing systems. LanguageConverter cannot be enabled for those languages when the page language is set to English. (Yes, I can bug the TAs every time I create a page in Chinese. But time is valuable, even for volunteers.)

Ideally, a page's language property should be correctly identified upon its creation. So, I'm advising easier access to the pagelang right. This Wish consists of two approaches.

  • Earlier this year, we have task T248294 deployed — autoconfirmed users can now create pages with custom content models. The right to change the content model is still restricted; but the right to set it upon creation is reaching more people. I think this is a great approach to this problem, if we cannot give the right to every editor.
  • Additionally, if it's possible, we might create a separate user group to give the pagelang right to more people. They can help with routine language-setting tasks without being required to master the Translate syntax.

Those two approaches are equally important. An on-create right won't automatically solve thousands of pages marked as a wrong language, but without it we'll have to constantly bug the language-setters in the future.

  1. ↑ if English had phonetic rules, that is[Kidding]

-- 魔琴 (talk) 02:18, 4 September 2026 (UTC)reply

Retrieved from "https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Requests_for_comment/Easier_access_to_%22pagelang%22_right_(Special:PageLanguage)&oldid=31007927"