Meaningless cosmetic changes fuzzing translations
I have just created https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T128338 which says:
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I would like to point your attention to this message's history.
The changes are: ''$2'' ---> "<i>$2</i>" ---> "''$2''" ---> "<em>$2</em>" ---> <em>$2</em>
Every change fuzzied every translation made until every one of thoose changes occured. In particular, the last one fuzzied over 200 tranlations. As a reminder, marking a message as fuzzy means that the translated message will be back to the English source until someone confirms or changes the translation. And we are taking about a message in "MediaWiki core".
Is this necessary/desired? Have developers been informed about the consequences of their changes to English source messages marked for translation, the number of current translations, the numbers of final users affected, and the time that they required from volunteer translators?
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I would like to hear everyones opinion on this and possible solutions.
I'm sorry to see this frustrates you. Localisation is a very dynamic thing. These things have always changes, and will remain to change. We try to be as careful as we can by reviewing new messages as they come in, but new insights also cause large changes to existing messages. The changes you point out above, for example, have a large impact for accessibility of the features they are for. Screen readers do nothing with the HTML tags b and i, but they do operate on strong and em. Thanks for understanding.
Thanks for your answer. I didn't know about screen readers and HTML tags compatibility. So thoose changes are not "meaningless cosmetic" as I said. I didn't know either that fuzzing messages does not mean that the translations are lost as I thought (that is why the ticket was closed as invalid). I don't feel frustrated now :)