[[‎MediaWiki:Wikieditor-toolbar-dialogs-preference/en]]

CLOSED This issue is closed

bugzilla:23942#c1 to clarify the message

I want to change this:

• ‎MediaWiki:Wikieditor-toolbar-dialogs-preference/en
• MediaWiki:Edittoolbar-cgd-preference/en (not sure what this duplicate is for, I guess it can be deleted)

I want to change it from:

Enable dialogs for inserting links, tables and more

to:

Enable dialogs for inserting links and tables as well as the search and replace function

Reasons: The old message is confusing and almost worthless. It doesn't explain what "more" means. It's not a description of what it really does. It's a description of what's happening in the inside of the software (there are dialogs used to provide these functions) but not a description of what really happens in the end. It's not a description of what the user sees. The new message fixes this. It's a description of what actually happens. For the user the checkbox changes two different things the same time:

1. It changes the two buttons to insert links and tables. It changes the buttons from displaying a wizard to simply inserting some characters in the edit window.
2. It completely disables the search and replace function. This is different from above. The search and replace button does not change it's behaviour like the other two buttons do. It goes away. Like it never existed. I consider this a bug (see bugzilla:23942) but since nobody wants to fix this it needs to be fixed by changig the bad message.

Side note: I will never understand why editing English messages is allowed but gets reverted every time without providing an arguable reason. Don't tell me it is not allowed. Why is there an edit button if it is not allowed? I guess I have to beg, to pray, to donate something or at least to jump through a dozen hoops. I never ever had such insane problems when editing German messages.

Altered messages need to be deployed into the distributed software files. This is not possible for English as a matter of workflow:

1. Programmers create english messages while they are updating programs in the software repository.
2. The English messages get copied from there and are kept here at twn.
3. Translators read English messages, and translate them.
4. Translations get copied from twn back to the software repository.

Both copy operations are unidirectional so as to not run into problems with duplicate or inconsistent parallel changes.

Think over it, it makes sense as it is set up.

You can alter English messages. Either do it in the source code if yo've got access rights, or file a bug asking developers to do it.

Then block all the English messages in the translatewiki! What's the problem with that?

If you think it's worth your while, provide a patch. I think that the warnings & hints or whatever you get, when you try to alter English source message, suffice for the time being - while/because there are things of higher priority on which to spent scarce developer time.

Why "developer" time? Set the protection level of these pages. Done.

Sorry, I was assuming you wanted to inhibit editing automatically.

Surely protecting thousands of pages manually is not good use of time (and we need to make sure bots and special cases still work).

It's also no good use of time to let people edit pages that should not be edited and revert every useful edit they did. This wastes the time of at least two people every time it happens.

Besides, what should I do to change the bad message I was talking about in my first post?

What bad message? This thread went on a tangent and I no longer know what we're talking about. At this point if we have a clear idea of what needs doing just file a bug to change the message.

I'm sorry? Read the first post please. Everything except for the "Side note".