breaking up MediaWiki message group to smaller projects
How to make translation tasks more digestable? Breaking groups down has been discarded. Compare: Thread:Support/RFC:_Personal_goals.
Maybe i'm not the first one who brings this up, but i couldn't find in the FAQ.
Yesterday i drove 170 km to Kfar-Kama in Northern Israel to teach a speaker of Circassian (kbd) to create articles in the incubator in his language and to translate messages in TWN. I showed him the list of projects and said that one of the most important things that will improve the Wikipedia in his language is to translate all the messages under the MediaWiki group. That's 2,496 messages - and this number appeared quite intimidating to him.
Is it technically possible to split MediaWiki into several groups? This will make translating less intimidating to new translators and help them focus.
You should have told him to start on the appoximately 500 "most used MediaWiki messages" group ;-) that certainly looks less intimidating. When I was done with that group, the (at that time) remaining 1,700 or 1,800 MediaWiki core messages looked very doable to me :-)
The 500 are already translated into his language :)
And 1,700 is still quite a lot.
It's not just about intimidation, it's also about focus. Well-defined groups like "editor", "navigation bar", "preferences", "special pages", "logs" etc., may make the work easier to handle in general.
I for one would not mind groupings of finer granularity, best ones providing some more context information than we currently have. I support that idea.
I would also suggest to sort message by audience - so e.g. messages seen by readers-only of the wiki deserve preferred and probably more careful treatment compared to admin-only or oversighters-only messages that only a small fraction of likely computer literate or nerdish folks will ever see, who often are known to read English as well as their mother tongues.
Not going to happen. We have MediaWiki most used, all of core, meta message groups and hundreds of different other extension groups. Yes, it is a lot of work, and it has to get done. Please consider "just translating" instead of talking about (and spending time on) how to make the translation process even more complex in itself or meta-engineering the few thousand messages that exist.
Of course it has to get done. Breaking it into meaningful groups will make getting it done easier.
I'm talking only about MediaWiki, not about the extensions.