Forum:Community Widget Localization

I'm trying to complete the French localization of fr.ikariam.wikia.com, and can't seem to find certain strings. In particular, the Latest Activity in the Community sidebar displays time elapsed as "yesterday", "x minutes ago", "x hours ago", etc. Where are those strings?

I'll ask for more as I not-find others, if you see what I mean. :-) Polytherion 00:22, 19 September 2008 (UTC)


 * It seems that there's no MediaWiki message for that. Maybe it's hard-coded? The Monaco Skin has this and other text interfaces hard-coded and unable to be translated. --Ciencia Al Poder (talk) -WikiDex 15:34, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

I guess I don't really need to point out how bad a practice that is? Polytherion 04:12, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Touring the Main Pages shows that only the French and English wikikariams show those messages: the "time ago" part is blanked out on the others (Swedish, Polish, Dutch, etc.). Polytherion 04:18, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I went to our (English) System Messages section and this is what I found so far:

As far as I can tell the word Hours' and  Minutes are hard coded so far and as Polytherion mentioned are not on all the different language versions of Ikariam Wikia, I hope those few links helped -- ( Morph | Contribs | Talk ) 21 septembre 2008 à 15:50 (UTC)
 * Minutes-abbrev
 * Hours-abbrev
 * Wikiastats days ago
 * Wikiastats months ago
 * if you go to the top of the page and type in Time you get a few that deal with upload times and such but nothing directly related to that Comunity sidebar settings


 * Yes, the timewords used in that widget are current hard coded in English. A ticket has been filed for this to be changed. We do realize this is bad practice, and we apologize for the inconvenience it has caused so far. Please bear with us a little longer while we get this taken care of. --Uberfuzzy 19:35, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

Where are the tickets? I tried Special:ProblemReports, but that's empty. Polytherion 11:24, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Problem reports is for users to report problem to admins about wiki pages. I was referring to an internal task ticket. I do have some good news! The changes have been made, and will be made available next week. Here is the list of the mediawiki pages and their English defaults if you would like to have them ready to go on your wiki.


 * 'widget-community-secondsago' => ', NaN $1 seconds agos'
 * 'widget-community-minutesago' => ', NaN $1 minutes agos'
 * 'widget-community-hoursago' => ', NaN $1 hours agos'
 * 'widget-community-yesterday' => ', yesterday'


 * NaN undefineds is a magic built in function that looks at the first thing as a number. if it is a 1, it uses the 1st text, if its more then 1, it uses the 2nd text.
 * also please note the comma, then space inside the quotes, this is important, please remember to leave that in there when translating them.
 * --Uberfuzzy 13:29, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Good! Onward:
 * In Special:SpecialPages, three strings: "Most popular articles (from database)"; "Most popular categories"; "Most visited pages"
 * Maybe also the "WidgetDashboard" string, which seems different from MediaWiki:Widgetdashboard
 * The Community widget's caption string
 * The Wikia Spotlight widget's caption string
 * The Related Communities widget's caption string
 * The Languages widget's caption string
 * The text at the bottom of each page, which reads "Hubs Gaming | Entertainment | [...] Advertise on Wikia | Privacy" (I edited the MediaWiki:footer_* strings but that change never "took". If these strings are from the Central Wikia server, there is no point in having them in each language's list of system messages)
 * The Gaming widget's drop-down caption (the one at the very top left that reads "GAMING")

The rest is in various sub-pages, to be dealt with progressively. As the French localisation stabilises, I'll back-port it to the ikariam.wikia pages (e.g. MediaWiki:*/fr). Polytherion 17:54, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm tackling Special:WikiaStats these days and here are the problems I found: Polytherion 14:49, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
 * The decimal separator is incorrect (French uses the comma, not the period)---this may be a wider issue than just the WikiaStats page.
 * The dates displayed in the Wikia's info block (and in the stats first line) do not follow user formatting preference.
 * The "KB" used in the database size column, the "Kb" used two and three columns left of that, and the "kB" used for the size selection buttons near the bottom are inconsistent in English and not listed as translatable messages (French uses "o" for "octet" instead of "b/B" for "byte"). I strongly suspect the "K" has size 1024, so even in English it needs to become "Ki" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix for the rationale). Also the "MB" in the "Most edited articles" table.
 * The month abbreviations are not taken from the MediaWiki strings (e.g. MediaWiki:Jun, etc.) and as a result June and July are indistinguishable.
 * The abbreviation for the month of August ("aoû" in French) displays incorrectly: probably an encoding problem. This screws up the distribution/breakdown tables, cutting them short. The months of February ("fév") and December ("déc") are also problematic as the English Special:WikiaStats shows (French is too young for those months to be visible): the "é" seems to be followed by a DEL control character.
 * Accented characters from any of the MediaWiki strings are not exported correctly to XLS. Occurences of "&lt;br />" should be stripped from the exported strings as well.
 * MediaWiki:wikiastats_more_200_ch is ignored (although it *is* exported to XLS).
 * MediaWiki:wikiastats_username is ignored (unless MediaWiki:wikistats_user_namespace is used instead?)
 * The "New per day" column header should be vertically centered like all others.
 * The "0.5 Kb" and "2 Kb" column headers lose the space when exported to XLS.
 * The Columns definitions need a space before the colon in French.
 * As a side note reply about "K" or "k" - K/k mean Kilo- KB/kb = KiloBytes but we do not use "Ki" for any unit of measure that I know of - at least not in USA - ( Morph | Contribs | Talk ) 15:08, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Ahh I just looked at the chart - and see your confusion - We don't use the IEC symbols - look to the far right of the chart we use the Binary symbols K = Kilo-  M =  Mega-  T = Tera-  aka KB for KiloBytes MB for MegaBytes and so on -- ( Morph  | Contribs | Talk ) 15:08, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I strongly suggest you switch to the proper IEC symbols, as use of M to mean anything but one million is, at worst wrong, at best ambiguous. Likewise for K/k. But that's a separate debate. Polytherion 01:54, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Hehe if it were only that simple - I can NOT change the system that the whole USA uses - USA is still not on Metric system - getting there but we still use Inches Feet Galons instead of Centimeter, Yard, Liters - the Usa uses Kb for KiloBytes or 3K  we use 3 Mb for 3 Megabytes  3 Gb for 3 Gigabytes - that is the way of the USA - we do not ever conform to the World standards  - we have to do everything in our own way - that is the mentality of USA -- ( Morph  | Contribs | Talk ) 02:00, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Not quite true: the US has been metric since the 1970s, from a legal standpoint. In any case, that other issue has nothing to do with the misappropriation of metric prefixes by a subset of the computer science community. For instance, Americans that do a "5 K run" do *not* run for a 5 times 1024 meters! :-) Polytherion 11:42, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

PLURAL: misbehaving?
Here's a head-scratcher: 'widget-community-secondsago'/'-minutesago'/'-hoursago', when written something like , il y a NaN $1 heuress  yield the opposite behaviour, displaying the singular message when the time is plural and vice-versa. It cannot be th ePLURAL: function because other messages---such as those used to display categories---resolve their plurals correctly. Can anyone figure this one out? For example, go to this category page and see how the category blurb is plural ("Les 2 pages suivantes figurent...") while the "Changements récents" widget in th eleft-hand panel obstinately displays "one minute" for multi-minute-old edits...The French system messages are here. Polytherion 18:34, 25 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Could it be the code was incorrectly implemented and the wikia is sending a string when PLURAL: is expecting an integer? Polytherion 19:21, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

Editing Tips Widget
The caption is unavailable for translation. There is also a problem with spaces before colons and exclamation/question marks (required by French typography rules): they are rendered as "�". Polytherion 12:50, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Now that its too late...
I would like to remind you guys, that this page was about 1 specific localization problem with 1 widget, not as a general dumping ground for every i8n problem in all the widgets and/or wikiastats. Your issues, while valid, are very very unlikely to ever be seen if they are buried on a page with a non connected title like this. You stand a much better chance of getting them fixed if you open a general forum page about the multiple i18n problems in the widgets, or post your wikiastats issues in the WikiaStatus feedback page --Uberfuzzy 14:14, 27 September 2008 (UTC)