Topic on Project:Village Pump

Yes, due to improper conversion when the UI language differs from the language to convert to in certain cases such as Special:Permalink/5860177. Other reasons include the desire for translation units to be independent of each other.

Category:Pages using deprecated NoteTA template claims that {{NoteTA}} is deprecated and to use {{LC zh}} instead. But the latter requires repetitively adding conversions for the same thing, while the former replaces every instance while being able to include common conversions.

@Winston Sung Pardon the ping, but do you know why it's deprecated?

The tracking category was added to Module:NoteTA, with only the comment "Add tracking category", by 122.100.88.89 (talk · contribs) on February 25, and the same IP then created the category a few minutes later, without comment.

@122.100.88.89: can you explain the reasoning for this unilateral and undiscussed (as far as I can see) deprecation?

Since this was unilateral, could I revert it? The IP seems knowledgeable, though.

Please note that IPs cannot be pinged, so it’s unlikely that 122.100.88.89 will notice this topic.

I've put a talkback template on their talk page.

The IP seems to also have mass-edited translations to port them to LC zh. Should we nuke these?

I think very few people other than you and the IP know about this well enough to have an informed opinion so.

@Aaron Liu: It is because NoteTA would mess up translation memories, so to ensure the translation memory can provide correct results with proper language conversion, always specify the translation for different variants.

But isn't NoteTA the translation memory? I can see nowhere else with a translation memory.

No. Translation memory is separated from the NoteTA template/module.

Translation memories is where the translation suggestions came from.

(the right part in the page translation UI)

Oh wait, the translation memory means the one on the right, doesn't it? Would it still be messed up if every page used NoteTA?

Edit: Thanks Winston for confirming the former. But does being messed up mean it displays improperly or wouldn't convert like the original page? In the latter case, would using NoteTA on these pages too solve that?

Would it still be messed up if every page used NoteTA?

The problem would still exist:

• NoteTA being place on one of the translation unit on a page, causing page-dependent NoteTA template transclusions showing up in different translation units' translation suggestions.
• NoteTA cannot always placed in the first translation unit of a page due to different types of translation units (e.g., syntaxhighlight, template parameters like the Localized_link template).
• Translators ignore the one-to-multi conversion and use the translation suggestion with broken language conversion result.
• NoteTA template being used in templates causing duplicated page status indicator

Also, every translation unit should be able to give correct language conversion result regardless of what the previous translation units were.

Another reason is the broken syntax in cross-page-language transclusion.

I'm not sure why we would need to transclude a Chinese page onto a page of another language as long as the title of the page uses LC zh.

See Main Page as an example.

Shouldn't the main page always be viewed in the user's language?

The Main Page template /zh translation page has the page language code in 'zh'.

Sorry for dragging this out a bit, but could you clarify what the problem with the main page is?

The Main Page has been migrated to LC zh, but here's a brief explaination:

Conversion-zh use UI-language-only detection and output respective variant contents.

If users view the template (usually by clicking the "other language" link) while there are inconsistency between the output language (UI language, the 'en' when not logged in would output 'zh-hans') and the variant language ('zh-Hant-TW' / 'zh-tw'), it will give out incorrect conversion results (e.g., '信息' vs. '資訊').

At this case, you can neither add NoteTA (as it will become many directly-exposed '-{H' tags) nor using native syntax (same reason).

Here's the URL with the problem:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template:Main_page/zh?oldid=5860177&uselang=en&variant=zh-tw

You could compare it with the latest version to see the correct conversion result:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template:Main_page/zh?uselang=en&variant=zh-tw

(permalink: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template:Main_page/zh?oldid=6306128&uselang=en&variant=zh-tw )

Also, using the LC_zh template in the page display title translation units is meant to solve the Localized_link template problem.

Wasn't the problem with removing namespaces?

Both the Main Page cross-language-page transclusion problem and the hide namespace problem.

As you can see, most of them were to ensure all translation units having consistency, always giving correct conversion results independently (instead of relying on other translation units with NoteTA).