Cannot save translations due to 'interface-admin' permission

You need the 'interface-admin' permissions to do that.

There are around 70 messages in the 'Wiki Editor' group that require this permission. How can I enter these translations? Could I request for the 'interface-admin' permission, at least on a temporary basis, or is there some place where I save the translations to be entered by someone else?

The Discoverer (talk)‎

I confirm this problem (I'm a translator admin too, but cannot edit https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=MediaWiki:Wikieditor-toolbar-help-heading-description/gom-latn&action=edit because of this lock).

What you can do is to prepare a list of those message in a thread on your talk page, with links to these messages, then your proposed translation.

Then ask to a site admin (here in this Support) to insert these translations (make sure you give the correct language code at end of each link going to the edit page that you see locked): give him a link to your message thread.

I suppose they are locked because of an old "cascading option" from a "full protection" because of links present in a Javascript/CSS/JSON page. The effective protection does not just require the "editinterface" right as indicated, there must be another protection.

This is another effect of the recent "incorrect caching" bug in this wiki since September (which occured in the "Memcached" server, not in the SQL server itself). When I visit https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=MediaWiki:Wikieditor-toolbar-help-heading-description/gom-latn&action=info (from the "information about this page" link in the side bar), I do not see any cascaded protection.

Verdy p (talk)‎

Thanks @Verdy p:. It will be quite tedious to create a list of links and translations for around 70 messages. Do you think that bug will be resolved soon and would it be better for me to wait for some time until I am able to edit the messages directly?

The Discoverer (talk)‎

I have now understood the problem: These "translations" contain plain HTML tags that are forbidden for being edited in MediaWiki. Notably, they contain plain HTML "a" tags that create hyperlinks, instead of the Mediawiki syntax for internal links. The reason for that is that they need to generate a link to the local page using the "#" syntax, over which a javascript will intercept the message. We cannot translate any message containing <a href="#" ...> here without being a very privileged site administrator of this TranslateWiki.net site (being a translator, or even an translation admin is not enough), because such tags could then contain arbitrary javascript code in the "href" element.

The error is accurate in that there is effectively the restriction in href and all plain HTML links everywhere on any wiki.

Those messages should have used placeholders (to be replaced by the actual HTML part that the Mediawiki editor extension itself need to generate to render these messages).

This is not a bug of Translatewiki.net or of the translation UI, the same restrinction applies if you try to translate the individual message directly in the normal Wikitext editor (which is possible in the "MediaWiki:" namespace only on this wiki and forbidden on all other target wikis where these messages will be imported and published, and where that namespace is also restricted to their local site admins (and forbidden as well to translation admins or other translators).

So this is a bug in the Mediawiki editor extension, to be reported to their authors (the developers of Mediawiki itself concerned by the MediaWiki editor) in Phabricator, so that they'll need to change their code and use the translation messages more properly. Those messages however are already deployed, and cannot be modified easily, they'll need to generate new sets of messages with the placeholders, that will use new separate messages (this time they will be translatable as expected).

For now, none of these messages can be modified in this wiki except by contacting the very few site admins of this wiki: you need to prepare the messages in a separate page (but not that the problematic HTML tags will have to be posted in a page by isolating their content within a <pre>...</pre> or <source lang="html5">...</source> block in your message (using "code" is not enough, they must be posted as literal code).

Not all these messages in the message group contain restricted HTML tags, but they were imported as "plain HTML" text (withjout any MediaWiki syntax restriction) so editing them is only allowed to site admins (on this wiki there are no more than 5 site admins, and generally only one available, and he can take a long time to see the issue and can delay a lot their edit or will not do that due to lack of time and lot of other works to do elsewhere to manage the core of this wiki, but no time dedicated to jsut some translations for what is here a bogous TWN project incorretly imported).

Verdy p (talk)‎

Thanks a lot for your detailed answer @Verdy p:. I will do as you say.

The Discoverer (talk)‎