Over the years multiple Content Translation users have been hit by the limitation that prevents them from translating an article when someone else had started the translation earlier:
This ticket proposes, as a first step, to remove the technical blockers that create such limitation and provide a more lightweight coordination approach:
Show a translation on the same topic and language as blocked only when it was started less than a day ago. Otherwise people can work on the same article freely and simultaneous publishing will be take care by Mediawiki.
Proposed message update:
This is an ongoing translation by <username>.
When there is an active translation you can only start a new one after a day.
Please try again in 24 hours or coordinate with the user who started the current translation.
This will provide some room for those actively working on a translation while preventing inactive translators from blocking other users interested in contributing.
Additional considerations:
- Avoid the loading error. The error shown when the translation is blocked ("Critical error: Content translation failed to load due to internal error") should be avoided. There is no need to even load the contents if the translation is blocked.
- Message placement. Show the message as a dialog centered in the screen. Some regression seems to have resulted in the message being placed in the top corner.
The current ticket does not propose additional coordination mechanisms. User will be able to start the same translation after 24h and publish it, and the one doing it later would overwrite the previous contents. In such case, the existing warning indicating that a page already exist will be shown as usual (we may want to double-check that this is still the case).
Separate follow-up tickets can consider notifying the original author that someone started a translation and/or published it for a topic they had in-progress, if needed.
The parent ticket (T86151) captures a more elaborate solution for improving the coordination among users (to be considered for follow-up interventions), and compiles some of the user reports in the comments.
