Support/Archive/2025/05

This is an archive page for the Support page. Do not post new threads here, they will likely not be read. If you wish to continue an archived discussion, start a new thread on the Support page and include a link to the archived discussion.

Account renaming request

Howdy! Could someone please rename my username to EGobi? It is unclaimed here, and I would like to claim it to ensure consistency across my crosswiki usernames. TheEduGobi (talk) 07:46, 26 April 2025 (UTC)

@EGobi:  Done Jon Harald Søby (talk) 00:17, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

Edit tracking tools for Translatewiki

Greetings, all! I am asking, are there any edit tracking tools for Translatewiki used for edit-a-thons? Thanks and warm regards, Kambai Akau (talk) 13:11, 27 April 2025 (UTC)

@Kambai Akau: I am not aware of any such tools, unfortunately. If you need some stats for reporting, feel free to contact me in Telegram, and I can help you conjure up some numbers. 😊 Jon Harald Søby (talk) 00:19, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

Lol. Thanks @Jon Harald Søby! I will reach out surely. Kambai Akau (talk) 02:12, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

Request to rename username

Hi there! In Wikipedia, I use NikolasKHF as my username. Is there a possibility to change this account name to NikolasKHF instead? Also, when I change the username, can all of my past contributions refers to NikolasKHF and not this username, or will they still refer to the old username? Thanks in advance. ID Owly01 (talk) 01:53, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

@NikolasKHF:  Done. Your new username will appear in page histories and logs; the only place the old username will remain is in your signature in old discussions (like this one, for example). Jon Harald Søby (talk) 00:16, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

Thank you! NikolasKHF (talk) 01:39, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

Delete

Hello, why are pages with {{delete}} not included in this category? Leo (talk) 17:30, 18 April 2025 (UTC)

@Leo: Categorization is suppressed in translation namespaces (like the MediaWiki namespace). A better way to find pages marked with {{delete}} is to use Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Delete. This is also the method used in the admins-only gadget that notifies administrators about pending deletion requests. Jon Harald Søby (talk) 16:30, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for your answer. Leo (talk) 03:26, 6 May 2025 (UTC)

How to translate translatewiki.net?

I have searched and searched, and even asked ChatGPT, but I simply cannot find where to translate the user interface of translatewiki.net itself. Does anybody know where to do that? jhertel (talk) 17:19, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

It's not documented perfectly well, and it should be in the FAQ. (Or maybe it already is in the FAQ, but it's hard to find it because the word "translate" appears there so many times...)

Basically, translating all the components of the Translate extension (core user interface, page translation, search) as well as the "Translatewiki.net" project is supposed to localize most of translatewiki.net (the links point to translation into Danish, which is your main language if I understand correctly).

Translating other extensions that are used on translatewiki.net is necessary, too, such as Babel, ULS, and everything else on Special:Version.

Finally, there are some templates and documentation pages that can and should be translated, although I don't have a well-organized list.

We should probably organize it better. If you see something that should be translated, but isn't translated yet, please just bring it up here and we'll try to document it.

And since you can edit wikis, you are welcome to start contributing to this documentation and organization yourself ;) Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 18:10, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

Thank you, Amir, for such a pleasant and extensive answer! 🙂

Your links did lead me to some of the places I have tried, but where I couldn't find the strings I was specifically looking for. And I still can't find them. To be more specific, when translating MediaWiki, I stumbled over two specific Danish strings in the interface which are grammatically incorrect. I tried and tried to search for these messages but to no avail. Maybe I should have been more specific about which strings to begin with, but I just thought I was searching in all the wrong places and simply needed to be shown the right place. 🙂

The two specific sentences in Danish (yes, you guessed the language right) are "[redigere denne liste]" and "[udvide disse beskeder]", and they appear for instance at https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special:Translate&showMessage=block-view-target&group=core&language=da&filter=&optional=1&action=translate to the right of the text box. The corresponding texts in English would be something like "[edit these messages]" and "[expand these messages]", although I don't know the exact English wording used, as those are just back translations.

Would you happen to know where I can find these? jhertel (talk) 23:25, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

Yes, I found these.

TLDR: You can translate them nicely in the translatewiki.net interface templates aggregate message group.

In more detail, they were in {{Template:Identical}}, which was kind of translated, but there were two problems with how it was done:

1. It was not translatable using the real translation system, but using wikitext tricks, which were hard to read and maintain. It was understandable back then, when the real translation system didn't work well with templates, but now it works much better, so it should be used in templates now. Some templates still use the old messy wikitext, and we replace it gradually.
2. A lot of the translations, including Danish, were written by a user who doesn't actually know the language, which is why I just deleted them now. (I'll restore a few that are likely good, but the rest should be written by people who know the languages.)

Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 00:36, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

Oh my God, that was extremely helpful! Thank you! 🙏

And you even explained where the strange Danish translations came from (I was wondering which Dane would have translated them such).

Thank you so much, Amir! jhertel (talk) 19:52, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

@Amire80: I tried to translate the template, but then I realized that 3 out of the 4 messages are redundant with those in Template:Related. Could we consolidate them somehow, so that there are only five messages to translate in the two templates together, rather than eight? —Tacsipacsi (talk) 10:46, 11 May 2025 (UTC)

Localization best practices recommend against message re-use :)

(For proper disclosure, I should mention that I wrote at least some of that section. However, when I did it, I just put in writing something that I had learned from @Siebrand and @Nike, and since I wrote it, it proved many times to be a good idea. There had been numerous bugs that would have been avoided if people didn't reuse messages.) Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 18:44, 11 May 2025 (UTC)

It’s about duplicating when the same word describes two concepts. “[collapse these messages]” over a list of messages and “[collapse these messages]” over a list of messages are the same concept. By the way, if these messages wouldn’t be overridden, both would display MediaWiki:collapsible-collapse, i.e. the reuse of the same message. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 23:12, 11 May 2025 (UTC)

Jhertel: in the future, if you come across a similar case, you can use the wiki syntax: insource:"redigere denne liste". maro21 (talk) 19:35, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

Ah, thank you, that was helpful! I will remember that. jhertel (talk) 19:53, 8 May 2025 (UTC)