Help:Extension:Translate/Message group states

This page contains documentation for message group workflow states. Let's imagine that some organization is using MediaWiki with the Translate extension. They use the wiki to write press releases among other things. What do they do? First they write a press release in a wiki, then make it translatable and invite translators to work on it. When translations are ready, they can publish them elsewhere on their website. But how do they know when a translation is ready, or more importantly proofread and corrected (see Quality assurance)? What if someone finds and fixes a mistake and the published version needs to be updated?

This is the use case the message group workflow feature is intended for. It lets you attach a tag to a message group indicating what state it is in, like "translating", "proofreading", "ready" or "published". This allows the different roles that work on a press release to explicitly expose the current state without the need of other communication methods. The translation administrator can look which translations are ready once a day and publish or update published versions. The translator can control when their translator is ready, and other translators can see what translations are already published. This is a workflow.

Setting up
By default, this feature is disabled. It must be set up in the wiki configuration. You need to decide what states you want to configure, and assign them colors in the hex format. In addition you can to choose the user groups that can change the states, for example translators.

Here is a sample configuration:

How to use


Once the configuration is set, both Special:LanguageStats and Special:MessageGroupStats will show a new column for the current state, and the tables can be sorted by state. The state can be changed in Special:Translate: just choose the group and language and you will see the state in the top corner of the message group description.

This state applies to a single language of a single message group, say the whole Italian translation of the translatable page "Fréttinga". In contrast, individual translation units can be accepted and whole translatable pages can be discouraged from further translation.

Everyone is allowed to see the states, and anyone who is allowed to change the state can change it to any of the available states. See the next section for more information about the future expansion plans.

Current limitations
Currently the states are fully user controlled. For now it is not possible to have automatic state changes (for example from "published" back to "needs proofreading" if a published translation has been updated) or perform actions based on states (for example preventing further editing of a translation once published or sending an e-mail to the responsible translation administrator for that page once a translation is ready for publishing). It is also not possible to limit who can change states in any way, by language, group or states. In addition the states are the same for all groups, although you can just choose not to use them for some groups.

These limitations are not inherent, modifications just have not been implemented. Some of them are likely be implemented at later time, depending on the feedback and requests, but mainly on the cost-benefit analysis.