Meta:Requests for translation adminship/Verdy p

The following discussion is preserved as an archive of a closed Meta-Wiki request. Please do not modify it.

Verdy_p

Frequently there are a few pages tht need maintenance here, and I block on them because they are locked in their state. I made significant work here on Meta to improve or ese the translations including to the new model using the Translate extension. For some templates, it becomes harder over time to use LangSwitch or similar but more efficient to use TNT for autotranslatable templates, that many translators have difficulties to work with. I'd like to convert more of these templates to use the Translate extension, and help maintaining thme in sync (including with changes in the MW UI. For that I just need being able to mark pages ready for translation or update the source and get the target translations in sync. I will improve later the language fallback mechanism (still not working properly here). And I'd like to deprecate and migrate legacy templates to the new mechanims which allows less maintenance. verdy_p (talk) 12:55, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Could you provide some edits when you are tagging page/template to check if all is right, please. --Base (talk) 16:57, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

May be you could look at my existing translations of Tech news, or ongoing work for making Template:TNT (and its associated Lua module) work now with all templates with parameters, or the now working translations of all templates used on the Main page (those that need named parameters). verdy_p (talk) 18:14, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Have you read the docs to the extension? (Page translation administration, Page translation example) Why do you put things like

<!--T:9-->

manually? --Base (talk) 18:29, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but this still blocks. In fact what is needed is that a translation admin unlocks the translations. I don't understnd why there's such a need of privileges to create a translation base when we can edit all other pages. Such blocking in fact creates more problems as it makes valid edits unusable and creates unsuspected problems in pages notably those we try to translate. Without this privilege, all we can do is to use the LangSwitch or #switch on int:lang, not the translation interface. verdy_p (talk) 18:37, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I mean that you should never add comments like

<!--T:9-->

because they are to be added by the extension when TA press appropriate button, otherwise behaviour of the extension can't be predicted and it may broke things. I'm not fully get what you mean by "privileges" and "blocks" - TA rights is just to press the button (I omit that TA shall check if all is OK which is obvious procedure) when page is tagged and some other minor things (e.g. move translatable pages, adding to aggregate groups and notificating translators in case of urgent need or just very high importance of the page). AFAIK TA-flag gives no edit-privileges. --Base (talk) 18:53, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

TA privileges are needed to activate a translatable page. Without it, the "translate" tags are not interpreted, and shown verbatim in pages (this is a major defect, any one should be allowed to prepare a translatable page without breaking it, notably to translate templates which are broken; the only alternative for now is to surcharge the code of templates with LangSwitch containing all translations, meaning that translators have to understand and edit the wiki code of these translated templates, or transcluded pages).

Yes these privileges are more a noise than they are useful, they also don't help notifying candidate translators.

Note that I did not speak about edit privileges. verdy_p (talk) 19:06, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think you understand that the  comments are added automatically when you go to Special:PageTranslation. There is no need to manually number each <translate> tag. Even when adding translation units (tags) to a page already marked for translation, you don't need to add comments like this. They will be displayed in the correct order regardless of the numbering. PiRSquared17 (talk) 20:35, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I perfectly know that they are added automatically by the tool... (but only if it's activated on that page). One fact is that there's already a translation for this template, which is still not marked as translatable as it should. I tried to make the TNT work on this template (it works provided it is used, but as long as the base template is not marked with the translation tool, the absence of use of TNT to render the template will break the rendering. I wanted to prepare the base template for translation with minimal edit, to help, but still this template is not translatable with the tool, but only by editing the full subpages per languages. Once I added the translation and immediately saw that the "translate" tags present in the base page were rendered verbatim in the French version, if TNT was not used to render the translated template instead of the base template. I found no way to fix it, and still nobody has marked this base template as translatable by a simple click.

I think this is a bug of the translate tool: even if (and as long as) a page is not marked as translatable with the tool, the tool is still active (it really shows the top banner about the page being marked with those tags), but it does not silently discard the "translate" tags if it chooses to render the base page waiting for confirmation; so the tags are rendered verbatim by MediaWiki. This means that there's no easy way to convert existing templates or pages by preparing them with "translate" tags (they should be discarded as long as the page is not imported and versioned into the tool, so that it won't break the rendering of these pages and transcluded templates). I did not want to break things but tried to help. verdy_p (talk) 21:01, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

In my opinion these notifications are optional, only for urgent things, because almost all pages, outside Talk pages, should be translatable, the top of page will contain the link to translate it in the TA interface as occasional translators will view this page, and the existing TA statistics pages already list the needs for translations in each group or subgroup

Ideally there should exist a "open" default group for all "non-urgent" translations (or one for each translatable namespace: at least main, "Template", "Category", "File", possibly "Module" as well for translating their "/doc" subpage, excluding Talk namespaces), not requiring any privilege: new translated pages would go into their own subgroup in this default group; the privileges being needed only to manage translation subgroups and their priorities, or notifications about them and some other status or flags, or to delete translations (keeping only the untranslated base page with "translate" tags cleaned; admins that can "delete/hide" a page should also "delete/hide" its associated translation group, so they need the TA privilege too; if one can rename a page, it should also rename its subpages with translations, and its associated translation group).

Then any Wikimedian could create translatable pages (just like they can create any content in any page or subpage, in any language, and in almost all namespaces including Template:) under the same policy for editors, and immediately start working on providing some translations. verdy_p (talk) 20:28, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Support Seems to know what he's doing, but I recommend you read the documentation again. PiRSquared17 (talk) 01:59, 23 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Could you, in the interim, mark the prepared Template:Evaluation/Header as being ready for translations ? (note: I had to create /en and /fr subpages to store existing variants and test that the template was correctly usable via TNT. When you'll park the template, the English subpage will be overwritten exactly like what I manually edited (by removing "translate" tags, and regerating the translation Id's in HTML comments (this is exactly what I was testing when I added these comment manually, because the /en subpage was still NOT automatically generated by the translate tool, which still ignores it). It will also overwrite the /fr subpage (with the default English content), I'll restore the indivisual items.

Note: the base template (because it already contains the "template" tags, is not usable without TNT, if it is transcluded in a page in another language than French and English (that' why I created the subpages, to avoid breaking pages, because otherwise the "translate" tags are rendered verbatim and not filtered out from the base template by the translate tool which still does not know that this template is translatable).

ideally there should be somewhere in the template a link to show the template base page, bringing to its own translation interface. For now all translatable pages using the Header template show the English version (from the /en template subpage, where there's no "translate" tags). we should not need to create subpages manually before the base template is integrated in the translation tool, the "translate" tags should be silently discarded by it and never rendered verbatim (sometin that I perfectly understand but that you've still not understood yourself). verdy_p (talk) 12:56, 23 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Weak support seems that you know what are you doing but you make things too complicated. There is no need to emulate extension-like behaivour to test templates because it's much easier to get TA flag and use it for it :) I hope that you will stop doing that weirdnesas after getting normal access especially i hope you'll not play with these comments as they make force the extension to work unexpectibly. --Base (talk) 18:08, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Too complicated ???? Hmmmmm. Certainly not. THings are like this only to make things works as they are (also because you don't want to make the work needed to use the translate tool instead, something I still cannot do). Don't accuse me of things that I simply CANNOT do another way.

You seem to not understand the fact that partial emulation is needed **as long as** a page which is supposed to be translated is still left unmarked in the tool. This is a reason why I asked the translate tool right: not leave these emulations around (needed to avoid breaks in existing pages or templates). If I had not done this, there would have been troubles left, because it is simply impossible, otherwise, to prepare an existing page for translation (even if it's not marked for it) without breaking it immediately. Apparently you don't seem to see the issue only because you already have this right, and can mark a prepared paged immediately in the tool. But bobody else than a few can do it. This means that lots of pages that should be translated are not (and none of you are able to do the work, you don't have time for this, and you also still ignore the preparation work already performed by others).

If there was not this severe limiation of the translate tool (I consider it is really a bug when it affects transclusions where "translate" tags are left visible verbatim, even if the tool recognizes the page as candidate for inclusion and adds a top banner about it !), I would not need this right, anyone woul prepare pages to translate and insert it in a list of pages for review by translate-admins (if they can care with this task). MEta has lots of contents intended to be international and used across all languages and projects. Its transaltion is needed, but there's simply not enough transalte-admins in Meta. So most of its content remains in English. Only a few pages are translated regularly, such as the weekly Tech news. For the rest, we are still using the old mthod using LangSwitch, which does not require any adminship.

I think a 'crat can close this now. PiRSquared17 (talk) 05:31, 30 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Done --MF-W 23:16, 1 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]