Template talk:Language/archives/Page
Comments on talk pages should be signed with "~~~~", which will be converted into your signature and a timestamp.
What to do
(using Template:Message) I have recently got WisdomBot working again, and one of the main goals of the bot is updating pages using {{Lang}} to {{MultiPage}}. However, now with this template being in the works I am unsure whether or not to continue updating pages to MultiPage, as this template would render all of that work useless.
I am not completely sure what why I am posting this message but I guess I’m kind of interested in what your plans for this are and what progress is currently at. --Wisdurm (talk) 17:24, 17 Apr 2024 (UTC)
(using Template:Message) Thanks for worrying about this. When I was creating the {{MultiPage}} template there were a lot of controversial issues:
- Due to the fact that the main page most often contained only a MultiPage, this made it a very short page and this had a bad effect on Special:ShortPages;
- Viewing the history of changes has become not very convenient, because you are looking at the history of changes to the main page, but it turns out you need to look at the history of the English subpage;
- There is some confusion with the editing buttons. I'm still not used to clicking the edit button in the right panel and constantly click on the standard button.
- Expensive functions: Each language uses an expensive function, which is why this template immediately takes 33 out of 100 expensive functions (at the time of writing this message) and increases page loading time. When adding a new language, another expensive function is added to all pages that use MultiPage;
- Indexing of pages other than English in Internet search engines is not very good, since the text itself is not written on the main page, but on subpages, so you get a link to a subpage, but this should not happen.
However, when we got access to editing the Main Page and began to actively improve it, THE OWL decided to do something similar as with templates: he made a strings subpage and put all the translations there, and just linked the lang subpages to the English subpage. When I saw this, I felt that there was a lot to work with, but after I told THE OWL the idea, he said, “Why complicate the editing process even more? Wiki is already battered by such a number of changes in translation methods… First we completely switched to Lang, now we are switching to MultiPage, and at the same time, another idea looms on the horizon” and I replied to him, “Forget it, I don’t like this idea anymore” (we talked about it almost a year ago) and actually I still liked this idea, but it went in the box of ideas for a long time. And quite recently, I decided to try to implement it.
The whole idea is that everything will be on the same page: the main content of the page is the construction of the page itself, and the second content is all possible translations. This turned the page into the real multi-page, saving us from all the problems I listed earlier and saving us from the need for many subpages. But there is a new problem: if you write everything on one page, it will be very inconvenient, since editing the page becomes a real pain. Therefore, I decided to try to make invisible headers and make two separate buttons: one for editing the page design, the other for editing translations. I assumed that editing by individual sections would work, but alas, this idea was not successful and therefore I deleted both buttons.
At the moment, while I was writing the entire previous part of this message, I checked how much worse it would be if I moved all the translations to the strings subpage… and it turned out that this option is better: it separates the translations from the main page making editing normal again, as well as this option.. is almost equal in processing, as if everything was on one page (and it’s even just a little bit better). It will also solve the problem with templates, making the Page template suitable for use in templates. Although for them it is better to make a separate template similar to Page, but with a documentation style and taking translations not from the strings subpage, but from the documentation subpage, in order to separate the documentation strings and template strings from each other, otherwise each use of the template will load its documentation, which will load pages using this template even more.
Right now I’m working on an improved version of the Main Page (including some visual improvements and optimizations) and am going to apply this template to it. Obviously, I won’t do this until this template is more or less complete. For example, I also want to add icons in the form of TopIcons, because this template uses <indicator>, which is why we will have to remove the direct use of the tag.
While I was making the {{Page}} template, I also made these templates, which will also be used in the new page system:
- {{Intlang}}: a more optimized replacement for the {{Uselang}} template.
- {{String}}: a more advanced version of the {{Autolang}} template (and with a normal name). It also contains a new ability to link one translation to another, as if it were {{#switch:}} (only the style of writing is different).
- {{Str}}: simplification in order not to write continuously {{:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|<textId>}}.
- {{Strc}}: A simple template for a small system inside the {{Page}} for (almost) automatic counting of the number of strings and how many of them are translated.
- {{Strings}}: a special template to replace the terrible {{#switch:}} structure that is used on all strings subpages.