Would it not be useful to have some kind of annotated list of system messages?
eg
- Message name
- English contents
especially important, these two: 3. When/where does the user see this? 4. Type of message (interface, explanation, warning, link text, link target, ...?) and maybe 5. How important is this to be translated?
This has been discussed before. See http://www.mail-archive.com/mediawiki-i18n@mail.wikimedia.org/msg00081.html
Because of this problem, Siebrand suggested Use case descriptions http://nike.users.idler.fi/betawiki/User:Siebrand#Use_case_descriptions They're now available for many (though not all) messages on Betawiki.
~~helix84
Perhaps the developers, who introduce or change those messages, should > > document their use. They should be in the position to do this accurately and effectively. Those use case descriptions are nice, but most messages, which need them, don't have them.
Slomox Marcus Buck
Use case descriptions have been used on Betawiki before, but were disabled lately. Nike, can you say something about this?
Sidenote about selecting messages by importance by frequency of their translation: Consider, that a lot of messages are not translated because they're new, not because they're not important. IMHO assingning messages importance will have to be done manually.