Years ago, in Messages*.php, linktrail was moved out of $messages and into a separate variable ($linkTrail) with a dedicated accessor in Language. This was because changing the link trail is potentially very disruptive, and the need for sysops to legitimately edit the link trail is very rare.

The same treatment should be given to linkprefix. However, after Iaa7eaa44 (and arguably before it), the regex is too complex to expect translators to be able to accurately maintain. I suggest taking advantage of the migration of linkprefix out of $messages to simultaneously change its definition, from a whole regex to a character class, similar to $wgLegalTitleChars. The actual implementation of the reverse search for characters not matching the character class would be in Parser.php rather than duplicated in 38 language files.

The /u modifier could be used unconditionally.

The few regexes that can't currently be expressed in this way (uk, cu, udm) are apparently not like that for any fundamental language-related reason -- they could just as easily include entire runs of quotation marks in the link text, like crh, cv and uz.

Version: 1.22.0
Severity: normal