Why?
Over time, we were recreating more of the existing functionality of our i18n message system. i18n messages can already be overridden on-wiki:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:System_message#Overriding_messages_on-wiki
Note that for our purpose the language of the override should match the site language code.
Downside
The original reason for handling these strings as on-wiki configuration was to centralize all wiki-specific setup to a single page. Message overrides use one page per-message per-language, increasing the number of pages that must be visited directly with the number of messages that need overridden.
How we got here
- Originally, the team decided to use on-wiki configuration strings for things such as edit summaries (T352675).
- Then we added the ability to insert tokens that work like i18n messages (T361107)
- This meant that every project was going to need to create a localised string with tokens for edit summaries.
- Then we started work on having automoderator send talk page messages to reverted editors (T355930)
- Some strings were specified as on-wiki config and others were specified as i18n message based on the estimated likelihood that they would vary across projects with the same language
- There was internal discussion of adding message strings to set a default value for on-wiki config strings
Acceptance Criteria
- move edit summary configuration variables to i18n message strings (T367791)
- update T355930 to reflect all strings being i18n messages
- all i18n strings that we think users may wish to override should start with automoderator-wiki-
- we can link to those without the list including strings that are there for error handling and internal reasons. Here is an example search for all of AutoModerator's message strings. Not that it includes links to the override page for each message: https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:AllMessages?prefix=automoderator&filter=all&lang=en&limit=50