Forced automated lowercasing problem in {{SITENAME}} (in few languages only)

Forced automated lowercasing problem in {{SITENAME}} (in few languages only)

This is imho a low priority issue. --Purodha

Template:User uses {{lc:…}} to make the I18n-ed words "Talk" and "Contributions" all lower case. In my language, that is wrong, and btw. inconsistent with other uses. The only acceptable way to have lower case initials was to convert "[the] talk" to "[to] talk" and "[the] contributions" to "[(s)he] contributed" which is lengthy when translated and also inconsistent with other uses. I see these remedies:

  • drop lowercasing (which is wrong for English, etc., e.g.)
  • keep lowercasing (which is wrong for German, etc., e.g.)
  • make lowercasing language dependant in the template (needs some work, and a list of languages)
  • invent and add a marker to mediawiki messages for "initial capitals that are there only because of them being the first letters in their respective messages" (and which can consequentially be lowercased in other contexts) and add a mechanism to signal that other context to message handling routines. (wow! brillant solution which should be proposed as an extension to CSS, HTML and text processing software makers, really! - Ok, only kidding)
  • Avoid message reuse by additional messages such as "Bw-talk-lc" originally defined as "{{lc:{{int:talk}}}}" and mark translation optional. The comparatively few languages where initial capitals are to be kept must amend them, avoiding "lc:".

Greetings.

Purodha Blissenbach09:45, 9 February 2011