Last modified: 2009-07-28 02:48:31 UTC
It would be nice if admins at Meta had a way to edit translations for SPI directly rather than having a vote admin insert each piece of text by hand. With only three vote admins there were often substantial delays and a significant amount of our time spent uploading translated text. The current system is workable, but somewhat unnecessarily laborious in my estimation. Perhaps one could open up the interface so all Meta admins could edit the copy of the SecurePoll interface at Meta and then create a translations dump file that could be periodically installed at SPI?
Just for the record: the reason translation updates are restricted to vote admins is because the security of the system depends on it. This was especially true of the license transition vote, where a translator could have switched the translations for two of the options, and if the language was sufficiently rare and different from English, nobody would have noticed. Practically, a community translation means that untrusted people will have to edit the translations on a wiki, but there needs to be the opportunity for admins to implement a review cycle, otherwise the security is a joke. The scheme you suggest is fine as long as the admins can choose the time at which the dump is made.
Implemented dumpMetaTranslations.php, a command-line script to fetch messages from a page like <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Vote_interface/en> and dump it in XML form, suitable for importing into SPI. The command-line script is specific to the current election and has certain configuration items hard-coded.
