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

[William Pietri]

On 05/21/2010 07:16 AM, Chad wrote:
> All aspects of the interface are indeed configurable, like you said.
> And this is useful when projects want to tweak the wording or add
> additional information. They should not be used to illustrate different
> concepts across the different languages though.
>
> And as Daniel has pointed out, there is a difference between the
> meaning of "sighted" and "checked" or "review" and "approved."
> These differences may be subtle, but they do matter. And it should
> not fall on the communities to "fix" translations that have worked
> just fine for quite awhile now. When you change the meaning of
> an English message in MediaWiki, you affect all other supported
> languages as well. This is a regression in FlaggedRevs.
>    

We're very aware of the power of names. For those who have been 
following my updates or the status of tasks in Tracker, you may have 
noticed that a text and naming task has been in progress for weeks. 
That's because good names are hard, and we really want to get them 
right. I'm not really involved in that, so perhaps Howie or RobLa can 
speak more directly to recent action there.

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.

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