Signatures should be able to be set as a global preference.
It should be made clear to users that they should
or the resulting signature may contain red links.
Could the extension automatically resolve namespace names to the canonical names when saved?
This can't be done easily as custom signatures contain text in nearly all cases. This text would need to be localized.
Something like the following would work wouldn't it?
[[{{ns:User}}:Example|Example]] ([[{{ns:User talk}}:Example|{{int:talkpagelinktext}}]])There's probably lots of scope for error there, but as an advanced feature I think it'd be pretty good. I guess it's a question of whether it's too complicated and would result in too many breakages.
Would it be possible to analyse the wikitext and prevent direct unlocalised links?
There's also the question of differing wiki policies on signatures, e.g. some not allowing font size or colour changes.
Yes. It will save as [[{{SUBST:ns:User}}:Example|Example]] ([[{{SUBST:ns:User talk}}:Example|{{SUBST:int:talkpagelinktext}}]]) in the signature field.
I think having signatures be global is a good idea but we should be careful about doing it.
That's a good trick. That could be pre-filled in the signature box maybe? But that would override their defaults on English/other projects. I'm unsure about how many people would understand the above and not immediately delete it and fill in their own version which would show up as redlinks on most projects.
There's probably lots of scope for error there, but as an advanced feature I think it'd be pretty good. I guess it's a question of whether it's too complicated and would result in too many breakages.
Would it be possible to analyse the wikitext and prevent direct unlocalised links?
I think doing this^ is going outside the scope of GlobalPreferences.
There's also the question of differing wiki policies on signatures, e.g. some not allowing font size or colour changes.
I think we can show a warning about this and people can take heed or not, up to them.
Practically speaking, most people wouldn't be editing a lot of different projects so they shouldn't run into that problem much.
Let's put this on hold until we have a firm idea for how it'll work without causing a lot of damage.
I think User: / User talk: works on any wiki, as a link, but not visually what'd you want on a non-English project. For true localization you'd also need GENDER support.
On multilingual wikis, I've seen a lot of occurrences of people from non-English wikis copying their signatures from their home wikis blindly, ending up signing with something like [[Benutzer:Username]], and having this as a global feature will only make this problem more widespread. I I think unless we come up with something bulletproof here, this feature is a no go. Just warnings will not help as nobody reads them.
Maybe convert the links when saving the signature? eg, [[Benutzer:Username]] would become [[{{ns:User}}:Username]]
That's hard to achieve for all links. And users might not be very happy with us overwriting their signature links automatically.
True, maybe don't let them save that preference until they fix their signature then?
@Ata the User namespace can differ depending on gender in some wikis, for instance: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:TheDJ and https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuaria:TheDJ
Hm, something I thought of when suggesting this on another wiki farm was to make the signature global, but only if "use wikitext" wasn't checked. Maybe that would help here?
Maybe provide a key like $userpage, $usertalk, $contribs, and convert it to wikilinks on saving?
Or maybe just allow users to make an error, since making mistakes with signatures is normal and shouldn’t be such a big deal. If you want to show to them how their signature would look on English-speaking project, maybe this is a question of adding an auto-updating preview of a signature that, in this case, will treat the signature as if it is being used in an English-speaking project.