Commons:Requests for comment/Assign translationadmin-right to admins

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Option Administrators should be able to add oneself to the “Translation administrators” group just went live by merging gerrit:86366 on 2013-10-07 21:00. Thank you Reedy.

Assign translationadmin-right to admins[edit]

The Translate-Extension is active on Wikimedia Commons and therefore a new user group right was created. Currently the sysop group (=regular administrators) does not have the translationadmin group rights. It was proposed to let admins assign this right themselves in future. However it would be straightforward to assign this right to the sysop group per default.

Another discussion was archived with 7  Support/1  Oppose and had no 'clear' consensus according to comment 10 of bug 49173.

What is a translation admin?[edit]

Translate UX main editor screen

A translation administrator (aka translationadmin) can mark pages for translation so translators can use the translate interface (aka TUX [Translation User Experience]) for translation, can aggregate these translatable pages to groups and even moving translatable pages without leaving a redirect. A translation admin should be familiar with the best practices about how-to-mark a page for translation and should understand that volunteers spend a large amount of time doing translations so they must not be lost. Only users who are regular administrators (sysop) and have the page translation right can delete translatable pages.

Rationale[edit]

  • Administrators without translation admin right cannot delete translated pages, they even can't move them.
  • The translate extension suffers from a bunch of bugs (software issues), for example:
Admins without the translate right cannot delete pages that have been tagged as translatable. I just went to delete the gallery page Kruistochten which was recently created nonsense. I got the message:
"Unable to proceed
You do not have permission to manage translatable pages, for the following reason:
The action you have requested is limited to users in the group: Translation administrators."

The page had the <translate> tag on it, put there by a contributor with two contributions, both nonsense. I removed the tag, and then blanked the page, but was still unable to delete it. Unless all Admins have this right, vandals need to just put the <translate> tag on a page to force its deletion by only the select group..

Jim, 12:16, 28 May 2013 (UTC) source

Issues and responses[edit]

  • When assigning the to the sysop group, users and translators would have no clue who to ask for translation assistance among the 273 admins.
    • Even if admins are marked as translate admins, they don't have to be necessarily active. A glad look at the page translation log will answer all these questions.
  • It would make sysops feel they can just use the tool as they wish, while they have to at least read page translation docs and follow some consensus.
    • Our candidates who went through the administrator-election-procedure can be usually trusted to read the manual before messing things up. There were some issues at COM:Licensing and other pages but none of those who caused that trouble was an elected administrator at Wikimedia Commons.
  • That discussion was started too early
    • If administrators are blocked in their actions by the translate extension, the discussion can't be stared early enough. There are only 4-6 active translation administrators.

Discussion[edit]