[Foundation-l] FlaggedRevs - Do you forget about other projects?

[Chad]

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 11:32 AM, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
> On the other hand, I think for FlaggedRevs the implied link between
> languages is weaker than a lot of other bits of MediaWiki. The
> FlaggedRevs extension is extremely configurable, and on top of the
> technological model the social model could plausibly vary quite a bit as
> well. Just to keep them straight, we've been calling the technology
> FlaggedRevs, and the English Wikipedia use of that tool Flagged
> Protection, because the English Wikipedia use is pretty different.
>

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.

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.

> Daniel is definitely right that we hadn't been thinking about the effect
> of our localization on other projects. Internally, we've been thinking
> of ourselves as localizing the German version, which is the leading use
> and the one we're most familiar with. We had been localizing the English
> strings to the planned English Wikipedia use, without considering their
> role as a default translation source for other, different uses of the
> extension.
>
> I'll certainly take this back to the team and see if we can come up with
> ideas to resolve the conflict, but if anybody has ways we could solve
> this problem, I'd love suggestions.
>
> William

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.

-Chad