[OSM-talk] Voting for adding the Translate extension to the OSM Wiki now open

[Minh Nguyen]

Vào lúc 04:44 2022-04-28, Mateusz Konieczny via talk đã viết:
> Apr 27, 2022, 11:36 by minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us:
> 
>     My point is that the technical changes described in the proposal are
>     indeed reversible. The extension is essentially a fancy form that
>     assembles the responses into a standard wiki page with invisible
>     <!-- T:123 --> comments scattered about. So if we were to uninstall
>     the extension, any page that had adopted the extension would remain
>     with exactly the same content.
>     What isn't as easily reversible is that there would probably be more
>     translations than before -- of more content in more languages.
> 
> Note that process of enabling this extension involves deletion of 
> existing pages
> in languages other than English.
> 
> So removing extension would require reconstructing translation pages.

Enabling the extension does not require deleting any pages. Migrating an 
English page to the Translate system doesn't delete any manual 
translations either. In fact, the extension comes with a dedicated tool 
for helping translators migrate a manual translation to the Translate 
system. [1]

Migrating a translation *back* to the manual workflow does involve 
deleting pages, but not the ones you're thinking of. When you translate 
a message (paragraph or section) using the Translate system, your 
translation is stored in two pages: one in the Translations: namespace 
for just that message, plus one in the main namespace that's assembled 
from all these translated messages. For example, [2] contains the same 
content as a bunch of pages like [3]. The extension keeps all these 
pages in sync.

If we decide to migrate a page back to the manual workflow, the 
Translations: pages would become orphaned, so they should be deleted, 
lest a user continue to pour effort into them, unaware of the lack of 
synchronization. If we decided to disable the extension across the whole 
site, then the whole Translations: namespace would also become orphaned. 
It would be possible for us to lock the namespace and delete it en 
masse. Deleting pages sounds scary, but these Translations: pages would 
be entirely redundant to the assembled pages.

[1] 
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Translate/Page_translation_administration#migration
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/COVID-19/pl
[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translations:COVID-19/109/pl

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us