Hi TEIA,<div><br></div><div>First of all, thanks for your comments. Let me first give some background on the implementation.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 25 January 2011 16:28, The Evil IP address <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:theevilipaddress@hotmail.de">theevilipaddress@hotmail.de</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br>

<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">



<div><div>Within the localizations of redirect.py, there are two Wikipedia specific translations, &quot;redirect-remove-broken&quot; (an edit summary), and &quot;redirect-broken-redirect-template&quot; (the template code to propose a page for speedy deletion).</div>

</div></blockquote><div>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 &#39;simple configuration&#39; - 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.</div>

<div><br></div><div>There is a more fundamental problem with this than &#39;translators don&#39;t understand it&#39;. The more fundamental problem is configuration should not be centralized, but should be <i>per wiki</i>. This means we should split <i>translations</i> off to TW and <i>configuration</i> 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?</div>

<div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>That&#39;s the background. Now to what we see today.</div>

<div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div><div>The problem with the first message is that people don&#39;t translate the links (or don&#39;t leave them out if there&#39;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.</div>

</div></blockquote><div>This is a problem, of course. We could/might solve this with better documentation (the &#39;qqq&#39; language).</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">

<div><div> It&#39;s bad because edit summaries can&#39;t be changed afterward, so the links stay there forever.</div></div></blockquote><div>I don&#39;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&#39;s just what happens at a wiki - a page is deleted, and the link is b0rked.</div>

<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div><div> </div></div></blockquote><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">

<div><div>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.</div>

</div></blockquote><div>I&#39;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 &#39;qqq&#39;-documentation might be a good start.</div>

<div> </div><div>Best regards,</div><div>Merlijn &#39;valhallasw&#39; van Deen</div></div></div>