2017-04-14 14:29 GMT+03:00 Jon Harald Søby <jhsoby(a)gmail.com>om>:
Huh, that's actually a very good idea, Philippe!
The aggregate group
system came about because we needed a way to group pages about the same
thing, especially like in the case of the IEG (Individuel Editor Grants)
pages where there were several interconnected pages and templates, and the
templates needed to be translated in order for the pages to be fully
translated. So to be able to give a single link to how to translate,
aggregate groups were needed. However, one problem that I had with that was
that pages could only be part of one aggregate group (I think that has
changed now), so when I had a template that was used both for IEG and
another set of pages, that had to be treated differently.
The aggregate group system existed before translatable pages were a thing
;). The special page is just one front-end for defining the aggregate
groups (the other one in use being the YAML files). Categories could be
another way of doing it, but it is not without its own problems.
But yes, your idea of using categories instead, so that I would be able to
give a link to
Special:Translate?category=IEG_translatable_pages and have
all pages in that category appear in the translate form, is a great one,
and would be a very good replacement for the aggregate groups. Maybe you
should write a Phabricator request for this feature, so the
internationalization team can have a go at it at some point?
No such team exists currently. Language team exists, but almost all of
their time currently goes to developing the Content Translation extension.
There isn't lack of ideas how to make things better or prioritization of
those ideas [1][2]. There is a lack of resources, articulation of the pain
points and coming up with reasonably sized fixes (that can be implemented
with current resources) that provide the best cost/benefit ratio. In this
case, too, there likely exists a some simple change to the special page
that can make it usable again.
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Internationalisation_wishlist_2017
[2]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/mediawiki-extensions-translate/
-Niklas