Hello everyone, The recent move of the translations to TWN is IMHO a long overdue step. However, as it's still pretty much in its infancy, not everything is yet perfect, so certain issues need to be fixed. I have to bring one to your attention that is a serious one IMO. 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). 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. It's bad because edit summaries can't be changed afterward, so the links stay there forever. The other translation is the template used to mark a page for speedy deletion. Many users just translate them to "{{db-r1}}", just like the en.wikipedia template, even if such a template doesn't exist there. In case their wiki doesn't even have such a template elsewhere, the message should probably be ignored. This is in fact not as bad as the other message, because such a template can be tracked, but it makes another burden when broken redirects are tagged with a non-existant template. 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. There doesn't appear to be other problems with translations of Pywikipedia, so just returning to the old way is not an option, but still I believe this isn't quite ideal. Cheers, The Evil IP address
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@hotmail.dewrote:
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
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