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?
| Subject | Author | Repo | Branch | Lines +/- | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Allow signatures to be global | Neriah | mediawiki/extensions/GlobalPreferences | master | +147 -16 |
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.
Something simple like --[[User:MyUserName|]] should work on all Wikis. The "User" namespace is recognized on all Wikis, and is simple to type by the users... no need for complex templates like {{ns:User}} ?
Change #1309683 had a related patch set uploaded (by Neriah; author: Neriah):
[mediawiki/extensions/GlobalPreferences@master] Allow signatures to be global
I think you're right. As long as the system actively enforces (block actions) the use of the English namespace, along with a separator to prevent flooding with English-namespace names, it should be fine. I've submitted a patch that does this.