Template talk:Lg

UI language as fallback[edit]

I disagree with your change which make display language names in user interface language inside all source pages of translated pages (i.e. English most of the time). That make the text of the page inconsistent: most of the text is in English, but some keywords are localized.

Using UI language make sense at Commons, since most of content actually uses UI language. At Meta-Wiki, we have detailed project pages with large texts. Personally, I don’t expect side boxes to be displayed in another language than remaining content. If we need to use UI language in some cases, I would rather support creating another template, e.g. {{Lg'}}, like we have both {{date}} and {{dateT}}.

That’s my own opinion though. -- Pols12 (talk) 21:45, 22 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Pols12: Thank you for reaching out. That seems reasonable to mean, I agree. I have gone ahead and setup {{LgT}}. I am curious what you think about edit I made to {{int}} and if I should setup {{intT}} or if the existence of {{int:}} is sufficient. Let me know what you think. Thank you! --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 21:54, 22 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your consideration. 🙂

{{LgT}} name is inconsistent: the “T” version of Date and Label templates use PAGELANGUAGE whereas that one use the “opposite” UI language. We may eventually rename current {{Lg}} to LgT, but we would need to fix all current calls.
Your edit at {{int}} indeed suffers the same issue: all English translatable page now display those messages in UI language instead of English. Again, I think it is problematic, but some other people maybe don’t share my opinion.

-- Pols12 (talk) 22:49, 22 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Pols12: Any thoughts on a better name we should use for the {{LgT}} template I created? Also - would {{intT}} be inconsistent as well? I can help with updating instances of {{Lg}} if we want to indeed do that rename as well. --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 02:17, 26 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Pols12: What about {{LgTf}} and {{IntTf}} with the thinking that "f" implies a failback? --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 17:11, 26 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

We probably don’t want to rename all templates which use PAGELANGUAGE to suffix them with “T” (that would include {{int string}}, {{country}}… actually most templates on Meta-Wiki). Unfortunately, we also probably don’t want to rename templates wich use UI language either, because they often come from another wiki (e.g. {{date}} expects to be consistent with Commons’ one).
I never create template which use UI language, I rather use {{TNT|uselang={{int:lang}}}}. I don’t know what naming convention we can use for such a template. “Tf” suffix seems me a bit intricate. I would use “L” (for local/localized) or a meaningless character like a quote ', but I have not a strong opinion.
However, I’m not sure whether you want to create templates which purely use UI language (like {{int:}} magic word) or template which only use UI language instead of source language. The second case seems me really strange because a French user would never see the English message, even visiting English source page.

You may want to post at Babylon talk page to get other opinions.

-- Pols12 (talk) 21:41, 26 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Pols12: After pondering this and talking to a couple folks who made requests that initiated my pathway to these changes, I think you are right for a vast majority of usages of these templates. There are a few "fringe" cases with templates used on both translated and untranslated pages (a few hatnotes for example) where having some failback would be - I think - helpful. As such, I have setup {{IntL}} and {{LgL}}. However, I will ponder these usages a bit more and try to avoid using these where it seems reasonable to do so. I like the idea of going to the Babylon page for more feedback if I do indeed find some logical uses for these templates to ponder their long-term usage. But if it turns out in a few months, I am just not seeing any legit unique uses, I will scrap them and avoid hassling more folks. :) Thank you for your input and helping me process this. As always - please feel free to ping me if you notice or think of anything else. --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 02:23, 29 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]