Custom i18n for third party extensions?

[zaventh]

Theme is working well. I added https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:HitCounters to my instance which adds how many times a page has been viewed in the footer.

This works except the following code attempts to lookup a localized string for the footer section it builds (named citizen-page-info-viewcount) which of course won't exist. The result ends up looking like this:

<section id="footer-info-viewcount" class="page-info__item">
        <div class="page-info__label">⧼citizen-page-info-viewcount⧽</div>
        <div class="page-info__text">This page has been accessed 4 times.</div>
</section>

For completion, the footer section looks like the following on a built-in theme such as MonoBook:

<li id="viewcount">This page has been accessed 4 times.</li>

One might consider this a bug but I didn't want to be presumptuous.

If I add the corresponding key to Citizen/i18n/en.json of course it works fine:

53c53,54
< 	"prefs-citizen-resetbutton-label": "Reset to default"
---
> 	"prefs-citizen-resetbutton-label": "Reset to default",
> 	"citizen-page-info-viewcount": "Views"

However, maintaining that kind of a change manually across upgrades is cumbersome and error prone. The same would be true to some kind of entry in $/languages/messages/MessagesEn.php.

Is there a framework I am missing for adding this content myself in a way that won't be overwritten on an instance/skin upgrade? Perhaps the skin should fallback to $item['name'] in Footer.php if no locale text exists? In that case the footer label would at least be Viewcount instead of ⧼citizen-page-info-viewcount⧽ which is at least readable (in English).

I would also be happy to PR this in to make this extension "supported" but I could only sanely do a few of the translations without just blindly using e.g. Google Translate.