Based on the unstable branch, the article "MediaWiki:All_messages", used for maintaining msg values is an interesting idea, but I believe this would be better built as a dynamically built page, i.e. as "special:all_messages", rather than as a static page in the database.

This would get around the use of external links to edit the variables instead of internal links. Is this done to avoid the slow operation of resolving [[...]] at run time? The problem is that this makes the database non-portable between wiki sites.

This causes a problem at our site because we update the database on a development server and then move it to our working server. It means I have to manually edit this page to change all the external links marked up on that page.

It may also cause problems because WikiMedia distributes the wikipedia database. That database also will not be portable.

I notice that on the wikipedia site, the similarly sized article "Wikipedia:MediaWiki custom messages" does use internal links and seems to resolve in about the same amount of time.

We plan to actually change the variable '$wgServer' at run time. We want to present the server address differently if the user links to our site via our VPN intranet versus coming in through an external URL via the Internet. So, we rather not have the server domain defined in the database, but always dynamically determined.

By making All_messages a special page, you can hide it to all but sysops, developers and/or bureaucrats, who are probably the ones who should see and maintain these variables. It also will mean that, that as a developer, if you add variables to "$wgAllMessagesEn" this page will be up to date without having to run an install procedure.

I also notice this page is built from the variable '$wgAllMessagesEn'. If this were built as a 'special' page, it could build using the language the site actually represents.

Nick Pisarro