Last modified: 2011-09-09 08:42:47 UTC
This is closely related to bug 24156 but is an independant issue. Currently, log messages referring to a user name - usually the user who caused the log entry to be created by doing something - list the user name in a quasi tabular format in front of the message telling what exactly happened. In English, this can be read as "user-name caused this and that." giving a nice sentence. Messages are worded accordingly. This does not translate to languages, where "user-name" cannot be the first word in a sentence. (Grammar, syntax, word order, good taste or style, and politeness rules may be prohibiting) It might thus be advisable, to tie the user name into the message text so as to allow it to appear at any place in a sentence. This gives up, however, some of the ease of machine processing coming with its current fixed position. My current opinion is that machine readable logs should be availabe much better via the API, and fixed positioning should be given up in favour of better i18n and language support. The possible half-way solution, keeping the tabular user name and passing the user name to the message handling of the textual part, would allow genderized messsages, and the message could even repeat the user name instead of using "this user" etc., but I think that makes log entries less readable. We could of course include the user names in the message texts andkeep the tabular user name field, assigning it to a display:none CSS class. This increases log page size. Yet this dupliction, without display:none, may be a good interim solution while messages are beeing adopted to the new style. Another way to make a transit could be to identify all messages being used for logging, insert "[[user:$1|$1 " at their beginning in all message source files, and alter message handling function calls accordingly. Thus, translators had unlimited time to fix them.
(In reply to comment #0) > This gives up, however, some of the ease of machine processing > coming with its current fixed position. We have API for machines. The log pages are for humans.
I think this issue should be closed as a duplicate of bug 24156, as I think the solution for bug 24156 will involve adding the user name and no longer requiring it to be "first in sentence". If this is correct, please close this as a dupe, Niklas.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 21716 ***