Page MenuHomePhabricator

Non-localized digits on Mediawiki:Recentchangestext on Bengali Wikipedia
Closed, ResolvedPublicBUG REPORT

Description

The Bengali Wikipedia uses Mediawiki:Recentchangestext to include some maintenance links. For example, it shows how many edit requests or AfD (Articles for Deletion) discussions are currently active (as shown in the green highlight in the screenshot below). On bnwiki, we use Bengali numerals, so in the maintenance links, all the numbers are shown in Bengali. Everything looks correct.

image.png (727×1 px, 169 KB)

However, when you go to বিশেষ:সাম্প্রতিক_পরিবর্তনসমূহ (Special:RecentChanges), at the top this page uses "Mediawiki:Recentchangestext". Today, it started showing the numbers in English instead of Bengali.

This has also broken a template. As shown in the yellow highlight in the screenshot, the template is checking whether tomorrow’s "Picture of the Day" exists or not. Since now on this special page, every number is converted to English, it is checking for the page "টেমপ্লেট:আজকের নির্বাচিত ছবি/30 May 2025" instead of "টেমপ্লেট:আজকের নির্বাচিত ছবি/৩০ মে ২০২৫". As a result, it says tomorrow’s "Picture of the Day" does not exist, even though it actually does.

image.png (925×1 px, 195 KB)

We have been using this Mediawiki:Recentchangestext since 2015, and until today everything functioned correctly. Interestingly, this Bengali/English digit issue only occurs at the top of the Special:RecentChanges; the rest of the page appears correctly.

Event Timeline

If I've sleuthed correctly in a non-English language, this template does not output a localized time because you did not ask for one in the parser function (see documentation). I can't say why it worked before, or if the parser function *should* be outputting 'native' time on a specific wiki, but that's probably one way to fix it now.

@Izno, The time parser always gives localized output, even on non-Bengali wikis. For example, see this page —since the content language of the page is Bengali, the output is shown in Bengali.

Anyway, that’s not the issue. The time parser and other parsers are working correctly on bnwiki and producing properly localized results, including this template.

The actual problem is that, since yesterday, on this specific Special:RecentChanges page, it is displaying English digits instead of Bengali digits. If you use the same template on any other page, it correctly gives the result in Bengali digits.

There must have been a recent change on Mediawiki that's assuming the content language of this special page is in English, and that's why it's showing English digits instead of Bengali (just my guess).

I note that this same phenomenon is occurring on the Bengali Wiktionary and the Bengali Wikibooks, but not on the Bengali Wikisource.

Aklapper renamed this task from Issue with Mediawiki:Recentchangestext on Bengali Wikipedia to Non-localized digits on Mediawiki:Recentchangestext on Bengali Wikipedia.May 30 2025, 8:05 PM
Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Bug Report".

Change #1152331 had a related patch set uploaded (by Jon Harald Søby; author: C. Scott Ananian):

[mediawiki/core@master] Ensure MessageParser uses the correct isInterface and language

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1152331

jhsoby added a subscriber: cscott.

This is somehow caused by Id3635641090bd8d9671eeabc58a4c45ac530879c, and @cscott already uploaded a patch that also fixes this issue for T395701: Limit Report localization is wrong. 🥳

Change #1152331 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/core@master] Ensure MessageParser uses the correct isInterface and language

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1152331

The patch is now live, and I can't reproduce this bug any more - @Aftabuzzaman @Aram please could you confirm if this issue still exists for you?

Yes, the bug is fixed. Everything is back to how it was.

Brilliant, thanks for confirming :)