2010/5/22 Rob Lanphier robla@wikimedia.org:
We fully recognize that the strings we plan to use on en.wikipedia.orgprobably don't make sense in a lot of different contexts, even English language wikis. We really want to get this release out the door, but we don't want to leave a huge mess in the process. Is there an expedient but correct-enough approach to solving this problem?
This was suggested on foundation-l by Chad, but I'll repeat it here: reuse messages as little as possible. If you're using the word "foobar" in two slightly different meanings and think other languages might want to translate each instance differently, use two different messages with the same English content. This allows translators (and sysops customizing stuff in the MediaWiki: namespace) to use different translations for each of them.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)