Project:Village Pump

When attempting to perform translation administrator-related operations, I encounter the following exception:

[3a0b003a-e559-4ac7-9c2d-cd2e0c97b61e] 2024-07-16 22:40:32: Fatal exception of type "Wikimedia\Rdbms\DBQueryError"

phab:T370219

After changing the user interface language to English, I can no longer change it to another language.

Two language bars are displayed on the Main Page.

Yeah seems far from ideal. This is a main-page, not some random page in the project and it totally breaks the aesthetic design.

CC: @Matěj Suchánek @Want for the relevant changes at https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Main_page&action=history

I discussed this with Want intensively in the last days. The problem he is trying to solve is the fact that for anonymous users it is quite difficult to discover the way to switch the language. He believes there are many MediaWiki admins around the world who would benefit of having mediawiki.org as the place-to-go for documentation, yet there is a language barrier. Ideally, the user needs to do the switch only once (i.e, on the main page), then all links become language-relative and surfing the web is smooth. Special treatment for the main page is in my opinion acceptable, the wiki's main page will always be "special".

Note that I do not like having two language bars either. The original language bar (placed at the bottom which is even less accessible) links to "Template:Main page/...", this is somewhat weird.

Ideally, the user needs to do the switch only once (i.e, on the main page), then all links become language-relative and surfing the web is smooth.

I agree this would be ideal. Unfortunately, mediawiki.org is quite far from this, because it uses the user interface language a lot – which defaults to English and cannot be changed by logged-out users:

• Main Page itself loads the main page translation in the UI language.
• Special:MyLanguage is used much (often through {{Ll }}), which redirects the user to the translation in the UI language (if that exists).

Those language-relative links are implemented by {{Pll }}, but that template is hardly used (353 transclusions vs 65k transclusions for {{Ll }}). For the main page, there are two possibilities:

• The current setup: Main Page itself is not translatable, transcludes a template in UI language. This makes language change and linking to translated main pages relatively difficult, but makes a reasonable guess for the user’s preferred language (at least for that of the logged-in user, since logged-out users always get English).
• What Meta does: the main page itself is translatable. This displays m:Main Page appear in English even for those who have set their UI language, but makes language switching and linking to translated main pages easier. (The languages bar is at the bottom there as well, but nothing would prevent moving it higher above.)

I prefer the latter because it doesn’t discriminate casual readers, but recognize that the former also has its advantages.

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