Rosetta Code:Village Pump/Language Page Links

Language Page Links
This is a particular discussion thread among many which consider Rosetta Code.

Summary

The best way of handling (automatically-generated) links from languages to the implementations of tasks in those languages.

Discussion

This is BR on a library computer (soon to be at home, and I'll verify it's me then), recommending that the links on the main language pages should point to the languages example. Example: On the 4D page, there are links to all the tasks that have been completed in 4D. The top one is "Change string case". It links to Change string case. If this passes, it would instead link to "Change string case#4D" --66.27.48.50 22:48, 23 January 2010 (UTC) BR 05:20, 24 January 2010 (UTC) (I'm at home)

The language pages are MediaWiki categories, which just don't support that. Unfortunately. —Kevin Reid 22:54, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

That's too bad... BR 05:20, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

With the transclusion functionality added to the MCS extension, it becomes possible to create category listings that aren't in the Category namespace. I wouldn't mind seeing that, to be honest; The Category namespace has a lot of quirky restrictions that have made some things difficult. (Such as their lack of supporting "#REDIRECT [[some other category]]") --Michael Mol 07:21, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

I don't see how that's relevant. It's not the page namespace that's the problem; it's that there's no way of expressing “Some_page#Some_section is in Some_category”, as opposed to “Some_page is in Some_category”, whether you use standard MW categories or MCS. Am I missing something? —Kevin Reid 12:42, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Ah, yes, you're right. I can think of three solutions, though:

• Do some JavaScript foo taking advantage of the referring page URL, and inject it into MediaWiki:Common.js. I won't write it, though; Cross-browser, production-grade JavaScript isn't among my skill set.
• Write a MW extension to inject that JavaScript code into the relevant pages. (To be included in Template:Task, for example.
• Write a MW extension to detect a forward from another page, and then re-forward to the present page+#lang. (That, at least, doesn't require JS support, but hits the server twice for the same page, and is a potential disaster if any part of the MW-to-user chain caches the wrong page.)

--Michael Mol 15:45, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Another solution I can see is if there was some server-side language (well, I guess JS would work too..) that redirects ?lang=4D to #4D (a MW extension might work there, appending "?lang=CategoryName" to the links to things within Categories). Another thing I just thought of is adding some JavaScript to the Category template that checks for all links in the first table under the heading "Pages in Category |lang|" and append #|lang| to the href attribute. --BR

I like the first option. The second is unnecessarily complex, and the third fails if, for example, a category page has a link to a specific example or other section of another page, because the server can't tell if there was already a #fragment, but JS can. —Kevin Reid 17:02, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

I'm going to try to write the JS (for shortcircuit's first option). This is by no means a discouragement for you to try as well - I'm not a JS wizard, so it'll probably take a while.