Topic on User talk:Jdforrester (WMF)/Archive 2

Hi Jdforrester, could you explain me a bit why did you remove the translation tags on VisualEditor. You wrote it is because a bug of the Translate extension. What bug is it? Thanks in advance.

Hey there. The superb Translate extension is sadly incompatible with the visual editor. It is inappropriate to try to make such pages translatable, as it just makes the wiki terrible for everyone. Switching Translate over to not be based on strings but instead DOM is a huge piece of work. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T131516 is the top-level task for this.

I disagree that "superb" is an appropriate descriptor for Extension:Translate. "Brittle" and "strange" seem like much more appropriate words.

Hmmm, so if I understand correctly, it just means that since people are using Visual Editor, translation tags should not be used because there are troubles with it. Right?

Basically, what you described is just a problem for English version, mainly for users who use visual editor. For all others languages, it is not a problem at all since users of such languages have only access to the translation interface. So should we stop to translate pages just because there are some issue with visual editor? I guess most of people who write on mediawiki do not use VE but I may be wrong.

No, it is a problem for the "master" version whatever language it is written in. We have been manually translating pages for 16 years. Doing so is not that onerous.

So, if I understand correctly your point, Translate extension should not be used on any wiki, right? Because I guess there are the same issues whatever the wiki the extension is used on. Sorry if I ask naive question but it is because I am a bit surprised because I never met someone that shows me these issues before. For example, on Wikidata, translate extension is widely used and I never met someone that talk to me about such problem so far.

Extension:Translate is "safe" to use on pages that you do not expect to edit again. It's used for m:Tech/News, for example: the 'master' copy is finalized, and then all of the translations are made. And we (to our sorrow) use it on some Help: pages, including Help:VisualEditor/User guide, which needs to be changed frequently. However, the use of the translate extension there deters people from updating the help page. Even experienced editors avoid editing that page. So it is continually out of date.