Markus Glaser glaser@hallowelt.biz wrote:
Hello,
What would be nice for a first take would be if, from translatewiki, one could click a link that would take one to a list of screens that show the message in question, with the text highlighted even. Even if the only thing we had to work from was a display of the English language texts in context, that would still be a big step up from where we are now.
I think, Selenium provides a screenschot feature. So if we can get Selenium to dump screens and name them according to a sensible scheme, that could produce the material you ask for. This could then be done for the English language as a kind of template screen set and also for the target language, at certain points, e.g. before a new minor release comes out.
That's worth looking at. Actually we could have complete walkthroughs via many different workflows in the MediaWiki, useful also for training or documentation purposes. I wonder how many developers after spending many hours on reworking code have time and energy to update guides like this:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/meta/wiki/Help:CentralNotice
What I am doing now is deploying a small test wiki on my box or on the Polish toolserver, enabled the specific extension there and click through it. But how many translators can do this on their own? Or even a better question, how can I share those one-time setups with other translators, since this is mostly a one-off effort? Or is test.wikimedia.org enough for everybody?
Of course, the problem is in preparing those "walkthroughs" - how to cover many variants of possible configuration (many extensions show/hide elements of the UI depending on various $wgVariables) as well as preparing a reasonable set of test data to be imported (having empty CheckUser or AbuseFilter interfaces is pretty useless). But having an automated screenshot machine gun would improve things a lot. Gee, I wish I attended one of the talks that Markus gave last year about Selenium.
//Marcin