Add Translate extension to main wiki

[Tigerfell]

There has been some discussion among the wiki editors whether to add the translate extension. @lectrician1 wrote a proposal that was subsequently accepted. Before the extension can be installed as intended, MediaWiki needs to be updated to version 1.38 (currently 1.37). I can write a PR that adds the extension.

Includes/obsoletes #555

[tomhughes]

Given how traumatic the last upgrade was I'm in no hurry to do another without some sort of guarantees that it isn't going to break everything.

[lectrician1]

Could someone look into doing this now?

[Tigerfell]

This is currently blocked by #749.

[muekoeff]

MediaWiki has been updated to 1.39 with openstreetmap/chef@bb3cefe and #749 has been resolved. Seems like this issue is now unblocked.

[tomhughes]

I've installed this on https://test.wiki.openstreetmap.org/ for evaluation - install appears to have worked without issues.

I suspect there may be some configuration needed to make it usable though?

[1ec5]

Thank you! Configuring this extension will probably be an ongoing task as we figure out how much the community will really tolerate this extension. It’s more straightforward for conventional pages, but we’ll probably need to tread more carefully on tagging pages for backwards compatibility with scrapers like taginfo.

The first thing we need to do is update the user groups. In particular, logged-in users need the translate right, and a new user group for translation administrators needs the translate-import, translate-manage, pagelang, and pagetranslation permissions. We can add all the administrators to this group to start out with, and I’ll lean on the bureaucrats to add more. I’ve marked this page for content translation, but no one can actually translate it until the rights are in place.

Separately, we should add some message groups. For the test wiki, we only need one to kick the tires on. I can configure the messages that are part of it on the wiki, once the group itself exists in LocalSettings.php.

In production, we’ll probably make use of more groups. Based on our most translated interface messages and the requests I often get, the following groups would be useful for keeping things organized:

• gadgets-messages for gadget metadata
• noarticle-messages for our 404 pages
• sidebar-messages for anything that appears in the sidebar
• taginfo-messages for the AJAX-based taginfo gadget
• tags-messages for tag metadata
• wikibase-messages for our Wikibase instance

Maybe @maro-21 has more ideas. By default, even translations of MediaWiki: messages are locked down to administrators only. If this turns out to be a burden, we could separately track creating a user group for interface administrators who only have the right to edit this namespace, without all the other administrator stuff.

We only need to create message groups for interface messages or other things in the MediaWiki: namespace that templates use. Page content in general can use content translation, which administrators should be able to handle on-wiki without your intervention.

[tomhughes]

If somebody can provide a suitable PHP fragment for me to review then that would be helpful - there's guidance at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Translate/Configuration.

At the very least I need to know what group to use for "logged in users" in order to give them permissions... I assume there is actually a group for that but I'm not actually sure there is?

As to administrators can a group be created from the settings file or does that need to be done from the web interface before I can assign permissions to it?

[1ec5]

openstreetmap/chef#568 has the specific PHP configuration you can use. I think the user groups part is still current, other than ideally granting translate-import and pagelang permissions alongside the other ones. “Logged-in users” is what the proposal called it, but autoconfirmed is a more reasonable group to assign to. The group needs to be created and configured in PHP, and then a bureaucrat can use the Web interface to assign users to the group (or we can make it so that administrators can add users to the group too).

[tomhughes]

I've added openstreetmap/chef@bbb97ed based on that PR though I'm not sure about the bit that disabled captchas, or are they only shown to unconfirmed users that that isn't needed if we're limiting translation to confirmed users?

[1ec5]

Right, our autoconfirmed group already has the skipcaptcha right, so it should be redundant. (It appears to be a reference to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T36182, which is still outstanding after all these years.)

Can you add me to the translationadmin user group?

[tomhughes]

You should now be in the admin group.