Category talk:Language user templates

message: Why are all these users in this category? They shouldn't be. -23PatPeter*∞ 19:58, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Never mind, that seems to have fixed it.Chimakwa 21:28, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: And now I see the oji- series is screwing this page up.. I'm working on it.Chimakwa 12:57, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Log 

message: Hi, I wanna add this: this user is a native speaker of english. TO ALL language userboxes. That will let users to type their own text. thanks. --Emperor Walter Humala  · ( talk? · help! ) 21:30, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't see the point - if you want a userbox with your own text, why not just write your own userbox? The point of the language boxes is that they are standardized. CMummert · talk 13:52, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  changing the text 

message: Hello! I just noticed the existence of these templates, and added the relevant ones to my page.
There's just one thing nagging me: Why exactly is the text only in the “target” language (for instance, for Romanian-speakers the text explaining that the user is a speaker of Romanian is only in Romanian). I expect these boxes are more useful to users that don't speak the respective languages. For instance, I don't speak Japanese, and it might be useful for me to know that a certain user knows it well (e.g. to ask for help, or to trust his statements with regard to something in Japanese). But since the text is in Japanese I can't read it (nor can I distinguish it from other ideographic languages). I think it would be nicer if the box also contained the description in the language of the “host” Wikipedia (English in this case), perhaps in smaller type. bogdanb (talk) 19:32, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay! I came in here to write this same thing. Looking at you unanswered msg since 2010, i think i should find some other target. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk)  10:14, 10 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text:  The descriptive text on the right side of the userbox is only in the target language, yes, but on the left side is a 2- or 3-letter (usually) code that identifies the language (e.g., "de" for German or "ksh" for Ripuarian). This is (or should be) the language's ISO 639-1 or 639-2 code. It looks like most, if not all, of the user-language templates have these codes linked to the appropriate articles (maybe that wasn't true when this question was originally asked), but if not you can look through the list linked to in the previous sentence. As for adding English text to the templates, you know that if we actually did that, people would be screaming bloody murder. [g] More the point, though, in the hypothetical cases mentioned above where the language name is already known before you get to the user page, then presumably you've already looked through :Category:Wikipedians by language or :Category:Language user templates to find someone who knows the language, so having its name in English in the userbox won't help in that case (since you needed the code to successfully use those categories in the first place); and in the other case where you see a language in a userbox that you can't even recognize, how is knowing the name of the language actually going to help you in any meaningful way? I can only think of one: to look up its Wikipedia article. Which you can (now) do through a link. Problem solved? - dcljr (talk) 06:33, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  Oh, but the "problem" is not solved if a user is using the Babel extension to create the userboxes. That version doesn't link to any articles since it's designed to work across all Wikimedia wikis (and keeping track of the article names for every language in every other language we have a Wikipedia for would be impossible). Oh, well... I guess in that case you'll just have to search for the language code to find the article about it. - dcljr (talk) 06:51, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: So you think we actually had no problem at all but only hypothetically made it up and came here to write about it? §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 07:07, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  No... I think the only problem is that you don't know the ISO codes for various languages. (Fair enough, most people don't.) That does make it inconvenient in the case where the code is not linked to a Wikipedia article (i.e., when a user has used the  parser-function approach), but in cases where the code is linked to an article (which seems to be the vast majority of the existing templates, if not all of them), I don't see what the problem is. - dcljr (talk) 08:18, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  (Sorry for these multiple replies, but I keep finding things...) I've noticed that many (but unfortunately not all) of the category pages linked to in both the template approach and the Babel extension (parser function) approach actually contain English text underneath the foreign language text (examples 1, 2, and 3). So, that almost completely solves your problem: click on the linked text in the userbox and you will hopefully see an English description on the category page. (In cases where this is not true (4), the category pages need updating, not the templates themselves.) - dcljr (talk) 08:45, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Language for text in boxes 

message: The following pages are causing trouble for :Category:User templates asf. They are User:Shelbypark; User:Shelbypark/boxes and :Category:User asf-2. Can you please spank these pages, I just created this new category yesterday.Catfurball (talk) 18:47, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: That was a tricky one, bit I think it is . Let me know if the problem persists. - Ahunt (talk) 19:05, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Naughty pages