On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 3:21 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <
amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
In addition to
this the patch in question brought up a second topic:
word length on mobile. On the watchlist view we have several tabs as
illustrated in this question which are optimised for single words (and
potentially can be truncated using the ellipsis method if necessary)
http://imgur.com/Jiv0XPJ
As you can see in the diagram - 2 words do not work very well in this
kind of view. I suggested a qqq constraint to limit translations to
single words -
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/97935/ - do we think
these sorts of constraints are okay for mobile? Another approach to do
a similar design would be to use icons, but icons in themselves have
even greater problems for translation.
Of course, the ideal thing is to make screen elements work with any string
length. By all means, please do strive to make it so.
That said, we don't live in such an ideal world. Even some of our own
tools sometimes have "strings-that-should-be-short". If there's really no
choice and a translation must be short, writing a suggestion about this in
qqq that is the bare minimum. A nice thing to do would be to have an
automatic test somewhere to check the string length of all the translations
of strings that are marked as such.
I think it would be nice to be able to enforce absolute string length
limits.
For instance, on account creation and login, the design is made so that the
field label and associated links are on the same line, opposite each other.
You can see on German Wikipedia's signup form that they've willfully
ignored this, and made the text overflow by putting an entire sentence in
to what should be a two to three word label. This is not because German is
verbose, but because they ignored the purpose of the message and previous
succinct translation. This kind of thing happens pretty regularly on our
wikis. Being able to set a max length on MediaWiki messages would prevent a
lot of instruction creep and abuse of our l10n/i18n system to uglify the
interface.
--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/