[[MediaWiki:Blocklogentry/de-ch] not exported

IIRC de-ch (and other of this kind) is disabled for export because we have had the issue in the past that someone translated every message into de-ch even that the translation is 100 % identical to 'de'.

In other words: We do not have a threshold for 'de-ch' but want to avoid a complete 'de-ch' file. This is prone for a lot of inconsistencies with 'de'.

If you think that would not happen again I would be happy to enable the export of 'de-ch' again.

This is a catch-22 (an impossible situation). Der Umherirrende is being asked to predict the actions of other users, before being allowed to make useful contributions himself!

Would this problem be effectively addressed if export were disabled on all subsidiary localisations like de-ch during translation rallies? Is it possible to write a bot which would automatically delete any translations identical to the root localisation (de in this case), before export is re-enabled?

I see that Portal:De has a prominent explanation about not creating identical translations. Are there explanations on all the portals which have language variations enabled? If not, I will have a go at drafting an explanation, and trying to find out which portals have this issue (including Portal:En!).

Export of 'de-ch' enabled again with Gerrit:24661.

Sorry for my unlogical "catch-22" request. But I think it is a good idea the disable 'de-ch' for the time of a translation rally to avoid mass identical translations.

How about:

1. marking these variant translation "languages" as ones the are only complete together with their fallbacks in their language object,
2. when saving messages, have a test based on this information, warning translators, when they attempt to save duplicates,
3. for the planned user-defined fallback language chains, avoid the necessity to specify the base language as a fallback to these lightweight ones?

If noone objects, I'll suggest it via bugzilla

Purodha, I don't think that suggestion 2 will solve the main problem above, which is that there appears to be some users on de-ch who are deliberately creating new duplicate messages in order to win the prize money in the translation rallies. Suggestion 2 seems to be an expensive way of making sure that users are informed that posting duplicates onto variant languages is discouraged, compared to posting a warning on the language portal, which most translators should see.

I would prefer to see de-ch (and possibly other similar language variants) have their export suspended during translation rallies, rather than disabling new edits to that language variant. However, if it is not possible to do a mass delete of identical messages at the end of a translation rally, then disabling de-ch appears to be the best remaining option. In that case, I would prefer to see de-ch only disabled, unless we have a similar problem with another language.

If translation rallies are really the problem, Siebrand can easily exclude people who do such translations even without deleting them, and probably specifying this in the rules would be enough to stop people.