Re-adding the list, as this is of public interest.
În data de 13 aprilie 2012, 19:42, Niklas Laxström niklas.laxstrom@gmail.com a scris:
I do consider users (at least one, me!).
Glad to hear that, but you're not the main user of either translatewiki or mediawiki in general.
If we must initiate discussion (if there even is a community) and wait for consensus (that might never happen) for every change we do, we will never get anything done.
That's plain wrong, and Wikipedia is here to prove it :) Many user scripts were developed after consultation with the community. They're working great and do what users expect them to do, not what the developers want them to do. I do agree that developement would be much slower, though.
Like I mentioned in the email, I proposed that we notify affected Wikpedias *before* the changes are deployed [1] and executed that together with Gerard. They were given right to veto any change they didn't like or wanted to discuss. And some of them did use that possibility.
Search for "translation" on the Romanian village pump: https://ro.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AC%C4%83utare&profil...
The ro.wp embassy: https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discu%C8%9Bie_Wikipedia:Ambasad%C4%83
I can see no such notification. No message from you, and only one from Gerard, when the translation team was founded. If you chose only some Wikipedias, then let me tell you this is even worse than no notification at all. The thing is - the wiki environment is by definition decentralized and hard to follow for small communities. If you choose to notify only big wikis or the wikis that already receive support from the WMF (e.g. Arabic, Indic languages), you're basically having no effect at all.
As to solutions, I have proposed at Wikimania 2010 to the person that was coordinating the Translation hub from meta to put up some automated notification system when a new translation request appears. This hasn't happened and translations in most languages are still happening by chance, as different users go by the translation hub.
I suggest you do the same, at least for Special:AdvanceTranslation strings. Some time before a scheduled deployment (ideally, 7 days, but at least 72 hours), notify _all_ the village pumps and some users (either all the users that translated the advanced strings, or all the users that sign-up on some dedicated page) of the deployment. This way, you don't have to wait for the consensus, but you're giving communities an opportunity to reach it.
The sign-up system might seem complicated, but it works - we use it on ro.wp for unblocking requests and for responses to warnings: we're handling all unblocking requests in a matter of minutes, vs. days before the bot warnings.
Another way to go is to have regular deployments as a rule. Right now, you guys are something like "oh, we'll do it about every 3-4 months, if the review queue is not too big and if something goes wrong we'll push it for 2 more weeks". Having the deployment schedule a year in advance, including the features you're targeting on each deployment, and enforcing a maximum delay of 1 week used only for deployment bugs and nothing else would greatly enhance predictability and give translators a target to aim for.
Sorry for the long email, Strainu
P.S. My "accusation" was actually an observation based on my past interactions with you on this list and on bugzilla. I don't mean any disrespect, but I stand by it.