Use Esperanto when no translation
Currently, whenever a string is not translated into io/ido, the English equivalent is shown. Can we fallback to Esperanto instead, which should be intelligible to most ido speakers?
Give that Wikipedia states "It is the most successful of many Esperanto derivatives, called Esperantidos." that seems almost like a no-brainer.
While I speak them both, I know that some Ido speakers do have some difficulties with Esperanto. But as a fallback it's probably more pallatable to Ido speakers than English. Also it will probably stimulate them to complete the translations xD.
Mi pensas ke ĉiu idisto Esperanton komprenas, iel ajn por ili pli facilos Esperanto ol la Angla. I think every Idist understand Esperanto. Ist easier for them understand Esperanto than English.
Well, it seems closed now. I personally have no experience with Ido, so my opinion is not an very informed one. Thus said, I agree with the general consensus, that Esperanto make a better match for Ido fallback than English.
I had a look at the Wikipedia Ido article in Ido, and I find them rather transparent. Thus said, as far as I understand, the fork was mainly conducted by French locutors, and French is my native language, so I might be helped with some bias toward French traits. But maybe we could also set a fallback from Esperanto to Ido. I'm not sure that it is so much interesting, as Ido community is probably far smaller, so I would expect that the Ido version have far less content to fallback on. There is also the wikitrans stuff, that might be interesting to fallback in, that's an automated rule based (as opposed to statistic based) translation of the English articles. But it would require more thoughts on how to integrate such a fallback.
We could make the reverse fallback as well, but since even MediaWiki core is only 25 % translated into Ido such a fallback would mostly be symbolic.
What about the wikitrans translations then?
By the way I just compared the io and eo strings and found that about 10 % of the io messages are identical to that of Esperanto. 97 % of the messages translated in io are available in eo.
There are sometimes small differences in diacritics and similar, for instance linguo vs. lingvo or autoro vs. aŭtoro, which should not impair understanding, and some mere differences in lexical choice, like licenza vs. permeso.
Some of the io strings which differ most from eo seem to be in Italian, actually (e.g. «Puoi scegliere la licenza che preferisci»).
In Esperanto, at least according to PIV, you actually can use licenc/o, which is also worded as "permis-il/o".