T165883: Language support requests backlog drive was good, but we need to make the approval smoother across the year. Siebrand still cares, but needs help.
In an ideal world we'd involve a "new" volunteer to take ownership of the process. This requires at least two things:
- ability to follow the same criteria as Siebrand (does https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translatewiki.net_languages suffice?);
- ability to follow all the technical steps, including giving or "automatically" achieving +2 on the relevant translatewiki.net configuration patch.
For the first point we could try to reduce the impact (or likelihood) of "mistakes", such as empty/invalid locales piling up at translatewiki.net or even MediaWiki core. It seems that jquery.uls doesn't mind having data about some languages even if unused, so that may not be a concern, but requiring ULS changes still makes the process dependent on whoever has +2 there and on their time.
For the second point it would be nice to simplify/collate some steps, for instance Lloffiwr mentioned that he's not very confident with patches and I don't know about Liuxinyu.