Oh, and this would/should make some huge template structures at commons for localizing numerals redundant.

Also, related bugs: [[Bug 18047]] [[Bug 19412]] #time localization
[[Bug 13025]] also contains some similar requests

And solving [[Bug 32618]] will probably help too.

Perhaps if inter-wiki transclussion ever gets merged into trunk, and if it supports localizing stuff to the content language of the client wiki regardless of what the source wikis content lang is, then we could integrate that into the foreign repo stuff, and maybe use that. (Lots of if coming off that statement)

As it stands here is how description pages work:
*the local wiki does an http request from commons (aka does the same thing you would do if you opened commons in your web browser. Well almost, it looks at urls like http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Compass_rose-hi.svg?action=render )
*Plops the result of that into the local wiki's image page.

Making all this magic word stuff vary by user language instead of content language (err, I suppose page language now) would probably have to be done carefully. (I imagine, i say that without looking at the code)

Just to make the links clickable:

Also, related bugs: Bug 18047 Bug 19412 #time localization
Bug 13025 also contains some similar requests

And solving Bug 32618 will probably help too.

Making all this magic word stuff vary by user language instead of content
language (err, I suppose page language now) would probably have to be done
carefully. (I imagine, i say that without looking at the code)

Not by user language, but by viewing project's default lang. Since this one is a content issue, I don't think we'd want the magic words to go back to english if I view the image in a local project with uselang=en.

However, this currently seems to be the default behaviour, example: see

http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/चित्र:Compass_rose-hi.svg

and

http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/चित्र:Compass_rose-hi.svg?uselang=en