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Showing content from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Directionality_support below:

Directionality support - MediaWiki

English (LTR) content with Hebrew (RTL) interface.

Support for different writing directions (left-to-right, right-to-left) is an important aspect for multilingual software. Since MediaWiki 1.18 , the support has been considerably improved.

This page gives some relevant information, and guidelines for developers and wiki administrators if you want to make a feature or extension compatible with the right-to-left interface and different directionality in general.

Some general tips for users, before getting to details for developers:

Most browsers support changing the direction of a plain-text editing area, such as article search boxes, wiki syntax editing, edit summary, etc. Depending on browsers and operating systems, this is done by Ctrl+⇧ Shift (Chrome and IE on Windows), Ctrl+⇧ Shift+X (Firefox), Option-Click-Change direction (Mac). This should help you typing in a direction that is different from the site's usual direction.
When typing a section in a language that has a direction that is different from the site's, add a div tag with appropriate lang, dir and class attributes. For example, when typing an English section in the Arabic Wikipedia, type <div lang="en" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr"> in the beginning and ‎</div> in the end.
When typing just a few words inside a paragraph, put them inside a ‎<span> tag with appropriate lang and dir attributes. (Many wikis have a template for this, such as {{lang}}).
To separate numbers from an adjacent word with different directionality, use RLM or LRM characters. Many wikis have templates for this, for example {{כ}} in the Hebrew Wikipedia, {{RLM}} in the Arabic Wikipedia, {{رچ}} in the Persian Wikipedia, etc. When a template is available, it's usually preferred to using the Unicode character itself.

You can report bugs in RTL handling in Phabricator in any MediaWiki-related project using the RTL tag.

Thanks to ResourceLoader including CSSJanus, CSS is automatically flipped to right-to-left when the user language is RTL. This is default since 1.18 (in previous versions it was dependent on the wiki content language). There is relatively little CSS that must depend on the content language.

Attention: when using ResourceLoader's debug mode, the CSS may be inconsistently rendered compared to the production mode. As a temporary work-around test RTL interface with debug off. (Issue being tracked as Phabricator:T29025.)

Main article: Manual:Language

$wgLang - user language (and the respective direction)
$wgContLang - site content language (and respective direction) -> here LTR
Title->getPageLanguage() - page content language (and respective direction) -> by default the same as site content language
- There are some default exceptions: see below
- It can be set in extensions by the hook PageContentLanguage
- This sets the TOC (and stuff like grammar, although not really relevant mostly) to that language. To do that only, use parserOptions->setTargetLanguage()
In extensions that should remain compatible with 1.17, you can use wfUILang(), however this breaks compatibility with 1.16 and below. This returns $wgLang in 1.18 and higher but $wgContLang in 1.17 (by default).

What should follow which kind?[edit]

Special pages follow the user language by default.
Source code should be English (CSS/JS pages are set to English by default).
Pages with translation as subpages should follow the language of the translation (e.g. "Page" is wgContLang, "Page/he" is "he"). This is the default for the MediaWiki namespace.
Input boxes and textareas follow content direction by default.
When viewing a diff, it follows the user language, but the actual diff text is in the page content language.

Directionality can be confusing, but you can watch mooeypoo's linux.conf.au talk entitled "Wait, ?tahW: The Twisted Road to Right-to-Left Language Support" to get a better understanding of the issues and solutions involved.

Anything on special pages that is different from the user language should have a <div dir="..." lang="..."> tag.

Example: SpecialRecentchanges->setTopText() which adds the "recentchangestext" message in the wiki content language.
Anything on custom namespaces that contains text different from the default wiki content should also have a div tag.
When the diff text is not the same as the page content language, use $diff->setTextLanguage( 'code' ); where $diff is a DifferenceEngine object.

lang/dir attributes[edit]

You should use HTML:

Xml::rawElement( 'div', array( 'lang' => $wgContLang->getCode(), 'dir' => $wgContLang->getDir() );

but sometimes that is difficult in dynamically generated elements and you can fall back on CSS:

.class { direction: ltr; }

MediaWiki version:

≥ 1.18

You can use mw-content-ltr and mw-content-rtl classes to make use of edit section links and ul/ol elements based on that direction.

E.g.

Xml::rawElement( 'div', array(
        'class' => 'mw-content-' . $wgLang->getDir(),
        'lang' => $wgLang->getCode(),
        'dir' => $wgLang->getDir(),
        'Text'
);

This is of course used for the page content of articles.

On file pages, it is only added around the actual text while the rest of the file page is custom UI (file history, ...).
On category pages it is added as on regular pages, but the text in the user language is embedded in a div with lang and dir attributes according to the user language.
On special pages it is not added because these are largely in the user language. A piece of text on special pages can be in the content language, which should then be embedded in these classes. It is for example used in the CodeReview extension for the code summary and code comments, which can contain ul/ol elements (* and # wikitext) in the wiki content language and in principle not the user language obviously.

Adding UI stuff within these classes should not be done. For example, the category links and FlaggedRevs review form are inside #bodyContent but outside .mw-content-ltr/rtl.