LanguageConverter needs love. Perhaps ContentTranslation is the way forward.
We need to agree on a roadmap to support similar language pairs, to minimize the amount of effort needed to share content between similar wikis. "Traditional" and "Simplified" characters on zhwiki are one end of the spectrum, "British" and "American" English are the other. [There are a *lot* of languages in between.](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedias_in_multiple_writing_systems)
We will come to a decision on how to best handle language variants, as on the Chinese (zhwiki) and Serbian (srwiki) wikis. There are two proposed options, both of them a lot of work:
# Deprecate language converter and split the articles in the database (perhaps even going as far as splitting the wikis, but the db split need not be user-visible). Use [the Content Translation tool]( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation) to maintain parallel content.
# Add Language Converter support to Parsoid and Visual Editor. Convert hard-to-edit inline conversion dictionaries to [Glossaries](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Scoped_language_converter). Add language/variant [tagging and tracking](https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T17161#201479) to Visual Editor.
Are there better ways? We need to come to a decision and invest the resources necessary to make one or the other of these happen.
(Continuing the discussion started at {T87652})