Last modified: 2014-03-17 14:29:39 UTC
The MediaWiki sidebar is only a sidebar in some skins; in others it can just as easily be on top or bottom. It is, however, the standard basic customisable navigation, and it tends to be shared between most skins, so it should have a name to better reflect this, such as navigation, or perhaps simplenavigation if we want to be more specific (and distinguish from, say, a nestednavigation and so forth). This would mean any mediawiki:sidebar would need to be moved. But there would probably also need to be a 'sidebar' alias somewhere for backwards compatibility: instead of calling any core Skin function, skins pull up data['sidebar'] and implement their own functions to render the navigation. So we can't just change which message is used for all of them in one fell swoop. (Given that most seem to just copy these functions out of monobook, this is probably another bug.)
Renaming messages while keeping backwards-compatibility is always a pain, and moreso with this one as it is cached in weird ways. I think this would be too much effort and too much annoyance for too little gain. (It dates back to 2005, by the way, r9177.)
Yeeah, nevermind, the sidebar is terrible anyway. Better would just be to add a new function that other things can use without changing the current stuff.
