I only now found out that the form labels in ProofreadPage's Index page creation form are not MediaWiki messages that are translatable in translatewiki, but must instead be configured manually in every edition of Wikisource.
There are at least three significant problems with this:
- The form is not affected by switching the user language—it will remain in the site's language. So if someone, for example, knows English and wants to contribute to the Sanskrit Wikisource, but isn't familiar with the Sanskrit terms for the field names, changing the UI language to English won't help. Example: https://sa.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=%E0%A4%85%E0%A4%A8%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B0%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%A3%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%95%E0%A4%BE:Gesenius%27_Hebrew_Grammar_(1910_Kautzsch-Cowley_edition).djvu&action=edit&redlink=1&uselang=en
- When a new Wikisource edition is created, an extra step of Index form configuration is needed to make ProofreadPage usable. This is an unnecessary complication for new communities, whose times would be better spent actually curating texts and not configuring highly technical forms.
- Metadata about texts is inconsistent across languages.
The capability to customize things is a good thing and communities should keep the flexibility to add special things that they need, but at least some fields can be made common and default across all languages. For example, all texts have zero or more authors, but at the moment every Wikisource edition implements different ways to indicate multiple authors, and this could be probably unified.
This is not a trivial task, but in the long term it should make Wikisource maintenance easier for everyone.
(Tagging also SDC General , because it sounds related.)