I had the same idea.
I hope this will result in more edits getting references, than being reverted.

no problem, I am having a hard time using phabricator rn.
knowing I made at least 1 useful ticket is good to know 😅

T96165 nailed it, except that i trust users with manual expert mode, allowing them to immediately specify what words have to be replaced in what way, for all translations they have the rule enabled for.

closed, is not an issue.

Update: this bug is actually intermittent validation on publishing criteria.
Usually it blocks, sometimes it lets it pass trough on reloading.

yes, completely agree, it's a ton of work and if every single parameter isn't exactly right, you'll catch flak for it.
So please, if this happens, do not forget to auto translate the language tag as well, if the source reference doesn't have language tag, make the reference say that it's the source language 🙏

you may have to tell the users to read every single source, because the target wiki may not trust the source wiki to be of a similar quality as theirs.

partial duplicate of https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T248378 (plaint text references)

partial duplicate of https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T233710 (#ref fails)

update:
after adding the legend myself, the translator tool has erased entry 2-4 out of 4 after saving and coming back today.
this is worrying because it erases content that was manually inserted succesfully!

A problem with the suggested solution is that you could bypass machine translation filters by saying "start with empty" and then use outside google translate outside the app.

it was also suggested in the dutch wiki, that the template somehow links to wiki data, rather than list 1 or all of the languages that have that page.