> It used to be that commons strings .. were only present once per module
This is intentional, as translators have been telling developers that every
message is contextual, with potential variance in the translation per usage
and thus common translation keys should be avoided. Sometimes a reference
to another translation is made with {{identical}} or see also via qqq.
As with the next point, this is also an effect of cases where we used to do
things that caused translation problems, and we now consistently try to not
do that, but that does mean more translation effort.
> Strings like: should not exist at all.
The problem is that some of these situations get pretty complex. And our
software also becomes ever more complex with more variants and more
exceptions.
And sometimes these are not traditional uses, but examples for in page
documentation etc, that are fed through a common widget, where making an
exception for that one single case might 'not be worth it'.
I do agree that there should be guidance on what should be translated in
cases like your example. But for many developers situations like these are
going to be just as uncommon to their development effort as they are for
translators. Please never hesitate to file tickets however.
It might be wise if we were to expand on
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Coding_conventions#System_messages
or https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Messages_API#Message_parameters to
detail how to write good qqq messages documentation.
DJ
On Tue, Jan 13, 2026 at 2:19 PM Dreamy Jazz <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'll answer your side question. The "#special" syntax is used to represent
> the translated name of the special page in the message while avoiding the
> need for a translator to copy this to the message.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Dreamy Jazz
>
>
> On Tue, 13 Jan 2026 at 14:14, Strainu <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> *Disclaimer*: I'm writing this mail with my translator hat on.
>> Throughout this email I will give some examples encountered in today's
>> translation session to clarify my arguments. If you wrote the code that
>> contain those strings, please don't take this personally - it's a community
>> problem, not a personal one. This is why I'm not providing the exact
>> message names, but only the strings.
>>
>> I've been translating OSS for 25+ years and MediaWiki for almost 20
>> years. For me, It has always been a common effort: the devs need to extract
>> the strings, document them to give context and export them to the proper
>> tooling, while translators need to understand the product, fill the
>> (context) gaps and be consistent.
>>
>> With our 284 languages and hundreds of thousands of strings, we're
>> definitely on the high side of effort needed for translations. However, in
>> the last few years (I would say, roughly from Covid) I see more and more
>> cases when the* effort is moved toward the translators*.
>>
>> It used to be that commons strings like Yes/No, Log in/Log out
>> Watch/Unwatch, Edit or Save were only present once per module. Today? "Log
>> in" (with this exact casing and no combinations) is present at least 5
>> times in MediaWiki core - User interface. Yes and No - 3 times each.
>> Name - 4 times and the list on.
>>
>> Another type of duplication are messages 90%+ alike, such as "Talk pages
>> for pages in the main/MediaWiki/.template namespace" instead of "Talk
>> pages for pages in the $1 namespace". I found at least 3 such instances,
>> there might be more.
>>
>> But wait, there is more. Strings like " [[{{#special:Contributions
>> }}/$1|$2]] ([[{{ns:user_talk}}:$1|talk]]) " should not exist at all.
>> First, there is absolutely no guidance on what parts should be translated.
>> [1] I would guess only "talk", which should be replaced with reusing the
>> simple message (aka {{int:talk}}), so nothing to translate. This would save
>> the translators the significant amount of time needed to decode the
>> message, make assumptions and (not) translate the text. I have some
>> more examples, but I'll stop here.
>>
>> We must not forget that the translators are also members of our community
>> and the translation time wasted on such strings could be better used doing
>> other activities in the Wikimedia world. The benefits are not small: 1s
>> saved over 284 languages means almost 5 minutes. If fixing your string
>> takes 15 min or less, it's probably worth it.
>>
>> I therefore encourage developers, project and people managers to* review
>> their practices* on generating strings and reviewing code in order to *reduce
>> the number of spurious messages* that the translators need to work on.
>>
>> Have a great year ahead and may you code be bug-free!
>> Strainu
>>
>> [1] As a side question, I'm very curious about the "#special " syntax -
>> who's expanding that into a proper namespace?
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