NOTE: Editors should feel free to review/override existing interface messages listed in the table below.
Context: Since many of Wikimedia’s deployed skins do not have accountable maintainers, WMF have been simplifying skins to reduce the maintenance cost of retaining these skins in production. This week a change was made, to simplify how menu messages were labelled.
Message keys are currently unpredictable. While we consider removal of the fallbacks altogether in T300183, we should at least make sure the skin key fallback is more predictable.
QA
| new message key | In Vector skins expected label | In timeless/monobook skin expected label |
| action-addsection | Add topic | + |
| view-history | View history | History |
| action-undelete | Undelete | Undelete {{PLURAL:$1｜one edit｜$1 edits}} (e.g. Undelete 2 edits) |
| view-view | Read | View |
| action-delete | Delete | delete this page |
| action-move | Move | move this page |
| action-protect | Protect | Protect |
| action-unprotect | Change protection | Change protection |
Acceptance criteria
- We will refactor the Skin code, so that all menu labels are routed via the same function, to prevent menu keys from being inconsistent in future. The message label logic will be updated to first check "$skname-$labelMessageKey" and then check "$labelMessageKey" and then the legacy key (https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/760670)
- To avoid any change to non-Vector skins, we will consider creating local overrides in the Monobook and Timeless skins (Modern and CologneBlue are in maintenance mode so we'll consider those separately)
- We'll implement the new message key labels (See table) with the new defaults inspired by the Vector legacy skin. For entries not overriden in Vector, we'll copy across the existing rules.
- We'll ask translatewiki to do a mass update of the message keys, to speed up translation. Ask Jon R how to do this.
- We'll remove the fallback message key labels once there is an i18n key for all the new entries.
