On translatewiki.net we have disabled automatic edit summaries. I agree it doesn't make any sense, but I have no idea how I could disable it conditionally. I'm retargeting this for core.

So, please provide way to suppress automatic edit summaries in PHP or when using the web API. No user interface is needed for me to use it in Translate.

Not sure I understand; is it saying "Created page" at times when it *should not say that*? Or do you just not like that it says "Created page" when you created a page?

(In reply to comment #2)

Not sure I understand; is it saying "Created page" at times when it *should not
say that*? Or do you just not like that it says "Created page" when you created
a page?

Hello Brion. It's the first you said I think, as you can see here, for example: https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Terms_of_use/es&action=history each time I translate a paragraph with the new translate extension at meta it puts an automatic summary that says "Created page" when it's not true :) -- It may be OK when a page is trully created, but next edits maybe shouldn't use edit summary unless you enter one in the edit summary box, as it happens on the rest of edits.

As you can see in the history of this bug https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_activity.cgi?id=32076 I opened this bug under MediaWiki extensions::Translate, but the assignee changed the component/product because aparently I reported the bug in the wrong section.

Hope you can understand :)

Best regards.

• MA.

There is a part of the problem here that's relevant to Translate itself, which is the question what the automatic edit summary _should_ be for translations.

Yes, it's very annoying to have the "Created with" summaries in pages like:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Highlights,_April_2012/sw&action=history

But would having no edit summaries at all be better? Perhaps it would be advisable to use the edit summary to provide a limited excerpt of both the source and the translated text, like so:

"Translated 'The Annual Report of the Wikimedia Foundation' to 'Der Jahresbericht der Wikimedia-Stiftung'"

The source/target text could be abridged with "..." as needed. This would make it easy to scan recent-changes for obvious translation snafus.

This bug with its current summary is a WORKSFORME in MediaWiki, because $wgUseAutomaticEditSummaries in core does this and it's Wikimedia projects' choice to have it true.

Perhaps you want the API to provide one such option on a per-edit basis?

@Nikerabbit Is this still the case? If so, do you know why these edits are saved with a "Create with" automatic edit summary? The revisions in question are very clearly not page creations, so this doesn't seem like a feature request, but rather as a bug. Is there something broken in core that causes regular edits to be seen as page creations?

In T34076#4940655, @Krinkle wrote:

@Nikerabbit Is this still the case? If so, do you know why these edits are saved with a "Create with" automatic edit summary?

Because their edit summary is a copy of the edit summary of the corresponding edit which creates a translation unit page.

In T34076#4940658, @Nemo_bis wrote:

In T34076#4940655, @Krinkle wrote:

@Nikerabbit Is this still the case? If so, do you know why these edits are saved with a "Create with" automatic edit summary?

Because their edit summary is a copy of the edit summary of the corresponding edit which creates a translation unit page.

Ah, thanks. That makes sense. That should be easy to fix, because both edits are controlled by the extension. So rather than copying the auto-edit summary the revision ended up having, it can make the replicated edit with the same original input as edit summary (which, in case of it being empty, will given MW a separate opportunity to make an automatic edit summary that won't be wrong).

Alternatively, if we don't want them to appear as like two "normal" edits in contribution histories, we could have some kind of canned summary like, "Automatic translation update from [[Special:Diff/123]]" and perhaps associate a change tag with it as well, to flag it as being "special".

Ah, thanks. That makes sense. That should be easy to fix, because both edits are controlled by the extension. So rather than copying the auto-edit summary the revision ended up having, it can make the replicated edit with the same original input as edit summary (which, in case of it being empty, will given MW a separate opportunity to make an automatic edit summary that won't be wrong).

The second edit is done in PageContentSaveComplete which does not have access to the original input.

Alternatively, if we don't want them to appear as like two "normal" edits in contribution histories, we could have some kind of canned summary like, "Automatic translation update from [[Special:Diff/123]]" and perhaps associate a change tag with it as well, to flag it as being "special".

Change tag would likely be a different task. Can you elaborate how you think it would help?

Change 978054 had a related patch set uploaded (by Jon Harald Søby; author: Jon Harald Søby):

[mediawiki/extensions/Translate@master] Add automatic edit summaries to the Translate interface

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/978054