On 10/10/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
I'd love to go over some of these excessively wordy messages and trim them. Especially all the ones that go, "You can do X at the [[whatever page]]". Instead of just "Click [[whatever page|here]] to do X".
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#link-text , but the general idea is good. Platonides' [[whatever|do X]] is better, with maximally descriptive link text.
On 10/10/06, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
When the messages are translated, they are translated as literally as possible in order not to misrepresent what is intended. The messages are typically created during the development stage. Saying that overly verbose messages are outside of what developers do is not necessary helpful. It is the English interface that is leading in this way and I am sure that the English community is less active in messages than any of the other language communities because they have not the same need to change things.
However, the details of local processes can only be added by admins, and that's a large part of what's important for this kind of thing (what doesn't belong on the wiki, what naming conventions are used, etc.). The generic messages in the default package will probably have to be made significantly wordier by local admins if they want it to be informative. That's not a reason not to trim them down in some places in the default package, of course.