Let's stop reverting as the page and its translations are complete mess now and discuss. I do not see any reason for your edits. You are basically making a) the translation variable not understandable b) the old obsolete translations valid. Both seem completely wrong to me, I would say vandalism. Please explain
Topic on User talk:Shirayuki
As I wrote in the edit summary, variable names should be untranslatable because some translators translates variable names. $1 is better than $irc.
Why is $1 better than $irc? In the summary you told me it is untranslatable. It is not true for many languages. In my opinion the variable name should describe, what the variable hides (e.g. $irc_link or $python_code)
Some translators translate/modify variable names. Will you fix all wrongly translated variable names?
Yes, but $1 does not solve this issue unfortunately. I think patrolers on this wiki are here to notice the issue and fix it. I'm not a patroler on this wiki.
So what next. Use $1 or $irc? I do not see any reason for $1 and I mentioned one reason for $irc. That's 0:1 still
Additionally, Special:Diff/3191614 contains wrong markup:
* Use the {{<tvar|irc>irc|pywikibot|<nowiki /></> #pywikibot IRC channel}} for quick questions
This confused translators. $irc #pywikibot IRC channel looks like template name.
If you do not fix, you should use $1. I have ever fixed a lot of variables.
Again, this is a problem of patrollers on this wiki (or the whole translation interface). If translator does not know, what variable is, definitely he should not translate. And still I do not see, why should I use $1 over $name. Is there any reason?
I know, thank you for this fix, but do not thank you for the other fixes (variable name and list removal). For the list removal see Help:Extension:Translate/Page translation administration, I can not find any info about variable names and why to choose $1 over $name anywhere unfortunately
Unfortunately some translators translate them on MediaWiki.org.
Help:Extension:Translate/Page translation administration is written about Extension:Translate NOT about MediaWiki.org.
I understand, but what prevents translators in translating $1?
So where should I find info about MediaWiki.org?
I know that $1, $2, ... have never been translated on MediaWiki.org.
That's great, but it does not prevent them to be translated in the future. It tells us just that Persians, Arabs and others, who can translate $1, have been good translators until now, which is not a thing we should rely on in the future.
Examples:
- translating variables: Special:Diff/3129215, Special:Diff/3124651
- modifying variables: Special:Diff/3158902
- adding extra white spaces: Special:Diff/3147555
The spaces can be added between $ and 1 as well
I also don't like that the whole page is created with named variables and you changed just one variable name to make the whole page inconsistent. Translators can now think this is a mistake and name variable in their translation, because the other variables on the page are named.
I would recommend to not fight over the naming conventions and respect what the original authors have used. Changing them just causes additional work for no good reason and is counter-productive.
I personally prefer names but they can pose issues with right to left languages (not sure if it is much worse than numbers though).
The translators who mess up the variables are just bad translators and should be told to pay more attention.
Both names and numbers already show as insertable buttons. In addition we can configure it so that unknown and unused variables make the translation to by fuzzy.
Fuzzy marking for missing variables like the one on TWN would be helpful also here in my opinion. At least for Manual:Pywikibot subpages for sure. TWN also do not let translator save the translation if a variable is missing. I thought this has been working the same here already. Is there any drawback for MW.org if it would be configured? Are there any pages, that could not be translated afterwards?
Special:Diff/1798340 is the original revision. I restored to this.
Not really, I just reused old message and its translations by adding <!--T:8--> to the newly added message to the page, but the variable name, missing *, and the spare ending period had to be updated by translators.
That's also why I don't like you deleted some old unused messages with translations, they could be reused in the future like <!--T:8--> was (except those talking about compat, in which case it was absolutely fine and thank you).
One thing I didn't remember earlier: making unused variable names fuzzy had some issues on pages where people were using dollar amounts like $100. If we only used named parameters that would could be avoided.
PS: This talk should be moved to the (finally created) Translator hub and discussed with the translation community here. There are some pros and cons of both approaches and we should decide, which cons are less severe and recommend that one in the future.
Hi,
I’m interested in this discussion. I think what should determine whether we use names or figures for variables is the opinion of the wiki administrators, opinion that might be the result of collective decision-makings on the wiki. Here Shirayuki is an administrator of the wiki. He (she?) says that from his (her?) experience, it’s better for this wiki to use figures for variables, so currently we should follow his (her?) opinion. If you have more arguments than him (her?), then you might open a debate so that there is a collective decision-making.
Maybe MediaWiki has a recommended workaround for the problem with dollar amounts? What should translators do? Should we surround the dollar signs with <nowiki> tags for example?
I also prefer when variables have clear names, but anyway it’s often not enough. What would be much more appropriate is that the translation interface replaces the variables with what they represent in the list of translations (it’s stupid it’s not already the case). Then we could know what the variable contains without having to open the rendered page (and if the variable is a link, it would make it work in the translation interface).