Last modified: 2014-08-25 19:55:53 UTC
I request the addition of an easy method for marking an entire message as being in English (or Hebrew, or whatever language is being used). One way to go about this is to add a line to the bottom of the form, that says something like this: Page or category containing list of pages to leave a message on: Subject of the message (also used as the edit summary): Body of the message: [X] Include timestamp [X] Mark language as using [Pop-up menu, default to English] On Meta.wiki, I would like the 'mark language' to be turned on by default, with the default set to English. (People using MassMessage on Meta are very likely to encounter language difficulties.) The defaults should be locally configurable: a monolingual wiki might want to have it turned off by default (for simpler wikitext code), and would certainly want the default to be the local language.
This seems like feature-creep. We tried to keep the input form as simple as possible. This is a content issue, isn't it?
Most people do not believe that adding complicated HTML codes like <div lang="en" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr"> (*Actual* content here) </div> is "content". One could just as easily argue that adding the proper formatting codes to ==The Section Heading== was "content", but you do that much simpler, non-talk-page-breaking task for them. We need this because it will help the 99.9% of people on the planet who *don't* know the relevant HTML codes and MediaWiki style names. For the 0.1% (or fewer) who actually know these codes, they can untick the box and type it by hand, if they prefer.
Can we do this as a gadget or something on meta? I don't think MassMessage should be aware of language content, not until we implement the send-a-translated-message feature.
Since my own talk pages haven't been broken by someone sending unmarked messages, then I'm willing to believe that this isn't urgent. People at LTR wikis might disagree with me. But: Why not? Adding these tags shouldn't interfere with the send-a-translated-message feature. If it'd be okay to have this running as a simple gadget, then why not just build it in and make it available to everyone, including people who didn't happen to know that you'd built a gadget for it? The first version need not be fully featured. Something that offers a list of languages/direction and adds the HTML code would really be sufficient as a first step.
