Forum:Default language

Our subject matter at genealogy.wikia is inherently multilingual because ancestors oftentimes have numerous descendants speaking disparate languages. The facts about name, birth and death form the essential content and this is easily made multilingual. If the tables come up in the visitor's language, we are delivering substantial value to them- and fortunately we can do this with int messages. For instance, see this Barack Obama article in French. I knew there was an important issue with logged out users but until recently it was only theoretical. We are getting indications this may become more than a theoretical issue because we have some active contributors that want their content in dutch.

I was thinking, is there some way to have a domain name set the default language? Eg nl.genealogy.wikia.com sets default language to nl? My understanding is no, because mediawiki namespace messages use the basepagename for the default language.

If anyone can think of an easy way to achieve this goal, that could prove to be valuable. It's not like this is any kind of pressing problem at this point, so don't waste any time on it- maybe keep it in mind though. Theoretically, this sort of thing could become a key competitive advantage our wikia has over the big boy genealogy sites like ancestry.com because we could draw on a global set of contributors. - ~  Ph l o x  19:42, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Ok to clarify... an IP user goes to NL.genealogy.wikia.com and sees it in other language that is not NL? or do you mean that a register user is going to NL.genealogy.wikia.com and seeing their content with the designated language inside their preference? --
 * I unintentionally threw you because I didn't realize that nl.genealogy.wikia.com actually exists. Let's get real concrete with a working example:. IP user goes to this commons page and sees the row names for the Template:Information used on that page in english.  Eg: the Date row reads Date.   If you log into your commons account, and set your language to es, then go back to the same page, you will see the date row will read Fecha.  Now imagine that genealogy.wikia.com was like that.  (It isn't, you can only see the messages if you use &uselang in the url- For instance, compare infobox row names here to those above for Barack Obama.  But let's just asssume that the wiki was configured so that it did display messages using the user's language preference like commons).  Now, what I was asking was: What if someone logged out could type a url like es.commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Multilingual_Countries_Map.svg and have the default $wgLanguageCode not be en but es.  That way my visitor would see fecha etc.  When the user edited the wiki they would be otherwise working on the same wiki as everyone else.  Just their default logged out language would be different- that's all.
 * In case you are concerned about the message cache and performance- Actually, to avoid what would become a gigantor message cache, commons is only minimally using messages. For instance in the information template example, the first line of the main Template:information vectors to Template:Information/es using Mediawiki message "Lang".  - ~  Ph l o x   08:02, 26 May 2009 (UTC)