Thread:Support/Special:AdvancedTranslate protection

I just saw edits to MediaWiki:Sp-translate-data-SpecialPageAliases/hi and MediaWiki:Sp-translate-data-MagicWords/hi both made in November 2012. Both edits are from users who are primarily involved in punjabi(pa) wikipedia. Neither has any significant contributions to hindi wikiprojects. See centralauth links, ,. However, both found it correct to edit special page aliases and magic words in hindi without any discussion with the hindi wikimedia community, despite the fact that they themselves can't agree over translations for punjabi,. All the edits that had been previously made to special page aliases (by myself) had been after extensive discussions at w:hi:वि:चौपाल/विशेष पृष्ठ अनुवाद. To top this, I've just seen that the changes to special page aliases and magic words both have gone through to hindi wikipedia.

I don't doubt that the users were acting in good faith. However, changes to these translations by any user, no matter how experienced, without community discussion is just plain wrong.

I've reverted the edit to the special page aliases and plan to discuss magic word localization with hindi wikipedia community soon.

The most striking thing I find in all this is that users with no relation to a language community were able to get translations to special page aliases and magic words through to the wmf cluster without the language community getting a clue about it. I find this very disturbing. I think there should be a mechanism to verify that edits to these critical messages are performed only by community members after due discussion process. It could be via either creating a protection level for these pages with a new user group for users allowed to translate these, or just plain full protection with users only allowed to request translations at talkpages, while twn admins verify that the edits actually have community consensus before they go through. Another way could be to separate those messages which are used in the wmf cluster and protect them, while allowing changes to messages not in use on the wmf cluster.

Lastly, when will the revert to the special page aliases go to the wmf cluster?

PS:Most people in India know more than one indic language, so it is possible that a repeat of this could take place. Hence the need to consider protection seriously.