On the live chat, @vmassol and @elenicojocariu pointed out that our wording to designate the concept of locale/language is pretty loose. Both words designate pretty much the same thing, and so far we used both interchangeably. More details are given on the ticket reported soon after
In order to make clearer documentation and overall make it easier for users to understand what is what, we should use only one word in XWiki Standard’s UI.
In XWiki Standard, we always group language and region together, and special variant preferences are not considered in the system (achieved with customization of the translations).
This means that both of those words are used to describe the same objects and the concepts related to it.
Proposal
Option 1: Use locale everywhere
Option 2: Use language everywhere
Pros/Cons
Option 1:
Pros:
This wording is closer to “localization”, and users that know about our localization system can easily associate the localizations to their “locales”.
Cons:
For every other non technical user, this is computer jargon and difficult to understand.
This word is used in other domains with a wider adoption, the user could try to apply their knowledge of what is a “movie locale” and get only more confused…
Option 2:
Pros
This is standard, very basic wording. Everyone can understand it. It’s commonly used on multilanguage web UIs.
Cons
Technically, this is not the correct word to use, because in XWiki, users pick both a language and region at once. AFAIK, users cannot manipulate anything related to a language without picking the region at the same time (even if sometimes the default region is hidden from the UI to reduce cluttering)
Opinion
IMO, the con of using language is only noticeable by XS code and localization contributors, with a minor effect. It’s way more problematic to make this concept harder to understand for the average XWiki user (the con of option 1. ).
I think I’d go with option 2 too (i.e. “Language”). It wouldn’t be the first time: we also use Page instead of Document in the UI for a similar reason (technically a Page is both the content + the skin around it, so it’s less correct than Document).
AFAIK there’s no place in the UI where users can interact only with pt and not pt_BR. What I meant is that, using the technically correct words, the users never manipulate the concept of “language” but only ever “locales”. If we start naming locales languages, it’s okay because it doesn’t collide with our designation of another concept.
I guess users that implement a locale without passing by the community localizations do manipulate both locale and language, but this is a very advanced use case and I don’t think we provide a UI to do this.
I quickly checked on my laptop settings (Gnome), and they use Language for the UI, and always add the region between parenthesis. See screenshots below.
Thanks for the proposal, @CharpentierLucas !
My preference goes to option 2, since “language” is a term that is more accessible to many users and is already generally used in web UIs.
@CharpentierLucas on the same topic, we need to settle between “default” and “original”, as in “Default language” vs. “Original language” (“Langue par défaut” vs. “Code de langue d’origine”).
My personal preference would be “Default Language”, because I always found the two opposite meanings of “original” (initial, first one, the standard for this kind of thing OR unique, different from the standard… ) a bit confusing.
One pro of using “Default” is that we use this vocabulary in plenty of other places in XWiki, which is not as true for “Original”. To go with this arguments, I looked the number of file hits in XS when looking for both words: 440 for “Original” vs 5.2k for “Default”. As a dev I see “default” way more often, not sure if this holds true for regular users.
My preference goes to “Default” too as “Original” has a meaning of the 1st one set and which was changed thereafter, which is not the case here.
Note: “Code de langue” is a bad French translation IMO. Maybe it’s correct technically (for the FR equivalent of Locale) but nobody will understand it. It should have been “Langue” (“Langue d’origine”).
for option 2
