[[MediaWiki:Wikieditor-toolbar-dialogs-preference/en]]
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:
- 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.
- 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:
- Programmers create english messages while they are updating programs in the software repository.
- The English messages get copied from there and are kept here at twn.
- Translators read English messages, and translate them.
- 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.
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.
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).