Hi TEIA,
First of all, thanks for your comments. Let me first give some background on
the implementation.
On 25 January 2011 16:28, The Evil IP address
<theevilipaddress(a)hotmail.de>wrote;wrote:
Within the localizations of redirect.py, there are two
Wikipedia specific
translations, "redirect-remove-broken" (an edit summary), and
"redirect-broken-redirect-template" (the template code to propose a page for
speedy deletion).
During the Amsterdan hackathon, we (siebrand, roberthl and myself) discussed
this situation. We decided that - especially as we wanted to implement it
during the hackathon - to take the approach of having 'simple configuration'
- i.e. the templace code in redirect-broken-redirect-template - in the TW
database. Configuration that was not simple text still is in the source
files.
There is a more fundamental problem with this than 'translators don't
understand it'. The more fundamental problem is configuration should not be
centralized, but should be *per wiki*. This means we should split *
translations* off to TW and *configuration* off to the local wikis. However,
these are not always easily separatable - for instance an edit summary with
a link - how would you separate that?
As we did not want to go into the details of this splitting, we decided just
to push it all to TW and to see how well it works.
That's the background. Now to what we see today.
The problem with the first message is that people don't translate the links
(or don't leave them out if there's no such
page on their wiki), but just
use the same links. This is because the translators are used to the warnings
that one gets when they leave out links or parameters in other softwares.
This is a problem, of course. We could/might solve this with better
documentation (the 'qqq' language).
It's bad because edit summaries can't be
changed afterward, so the links
stay there forever.
I don't think this really is an issue. First of all, bot owners are
responsible for their own edits, so they should check them. Secondly, there
are /lots/ of old edit summaries with broken links. It's just what happens
at a wiki - a page is deleted, and the link is b0rked.
What do you suggest to tell people what to do with
these translations? Of
course, the already existing wrong translations need to be taken care of,
but it should also be prevented that such things happen again in the future.
I'm not quite sure. In the long run, we should work out the problem of how
to split configuration and translation correctly. In the short run,
improving the 'qqq'-documentation might be a good start.
Best regards,
Merlijn 'valhallasw' van Deen