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
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