On 05/21/2010 08:51 AM, Chad wrote:
There are two things wrong here.
The first is attempting to reuse messages for different purposes. If
the workflow and ideas behind the UI are different, then there need
to be different messages, not changing of ones that work just fine
and make plenty of sense to the thousands already using them.
Agreed. Are other people using the English messages other than as a
translation source?
I'm aware of the distinction between FlaggedRevs
and Flagged
Protection, but it leads to the second problem. If the two proposals
are so vastly different and their UIs different enough to cause issues
with people already using it: why was it not done as a new extension
entirely? Rather than trying to turn FR into the one-size-fits-all
reviewing tool, it seems to me that we should've started a second
extension. Of course it's too late to turn back now.
I wasn't around for a lot of the history, but from what I know all of
the decisions made at the time were reasonable. Straying for a moment
into the always risky if-I-knew-then-what-I-know-now mode, I think we
would have been better off building a much less flexible extension to
begin with, one more targeted to the initial actual use. For Flagged
Protection, though, my understanding is that adding further
configurability to FlaggedRevs was the most efficient choice.
Regardless, you're right that we can't change history, and that any
major refactoring of the code should wait until after we launch. I'll
make sure we talk about this in the post-launch retrospective, though.
Short of forking the Enwiki changes to its own
extension (which isn't
feasible at this point, I'll be the first to admit), I would suggest trying
to segregate the two as much as humanly possible. The UIs and workflow
for what the English Wikipedia wants FlaggedRevs to do and what it's
been doing on other wikis for years are vastly different, and trying to
reuse aspects of one in the other (especially messages!) will just confuse
people already happily using FR.
Yep, agreed. We'll discuss this next we meet and see if we can come up
with anything. Sounds like we'll be in the situation of having two sets
of English strings: one as the generic translation source and one for
use on the English Wikipedia. Is anybody aware of a precedent for that?
William