[Foundation-l] New projects opened

[Kaare Olsen]

On Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:33:34 +0200
Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:

> The only relevant local localisations are the ones that provide
> specific information about that project. All the other localisations
> are suspect because they often no longer reflect the original
> message. Regularly messages change their text, add parameters, are
> using new internationalisation features and without the FUZZY
> mechanism employed at translatewiki.net there is no way that you are
> even aware of this.

As long at a message isn't wrong people primarily working on the 
encyclopedia, rather than primarily translating the interface, won't 
care much about such changes.  Since most people are introduced to 
MediaWiki through Wikipedia their primary project likely remains 
writing the encyclopedia.

> Local localisations do not deserve consideration and the only reason
> why they should not have been removed and outlawed is that we do not
> have a mechanism yet to bring you new localisations in a timely
> manner.

That's a pretty patronising statement, invalidating people's work 
because it isn't contributed to your project.

> When the LocalisationUpdate extension is finally activated
> for all the wikis of the Wikimedia Foundation there is no longer a
> valid reason to localise locally for standard messages.

Believe it or not, I'm looking forward to it.  This current limbo has 
at times been a major annoyance, with peculiar translations arriving 
out of the blue and not one single place to fix them - hence, for better 
or for worse, the local translations.

> Translatewiki.net allows you to proof read your localisations, so I
> urge you to work on the quality of your localisations and do it where
> this effort makes the biggest difference.

Until the LocalisationUpdate extension is in place, it mostly creates a 
lot of extra work to smallish communities to maintain a localisation.  

When the extension is enabled I'll make sure to do my interface 
translations at Translatewiki; there's nothing wrong with the idea.

-- 
Regards, Kaare