Last modified: 2009-07-23 07:10:54 UTC
Currently one starts a SecurePoll session by visiting it at your local wiki. This includes a message that we referred to as the "jump text" informing users that they would be going to an off-WMF site to vote. Currently only developers can update the jump text at all the local wikis. Vote admins can update the copy on the SPI wiki, but because the jump text appears locally on the user's original wiki this has no effect. This had the result that translations made to the jump text after the start of the vote were mostly never seen by users. We actually offended several translators who thought their work was being deliberately ignored. There needs to be some practical process or mechanism by which changes made at SPI to the jump text can be propagated to all the other wikis. Perhaps the wikis could query SPI for this text and cache it for 24 hours or something?
This is done as of r53668, as far as the method goes. It just needs a few lines of wrapper scripts and cron configuration to make it work for the coming Board election. A cron job at SPI can generate a periodic dump of all messages (in XML format) and expose it on the web. Then a cron job at Wikimedia can download the dump and load it into all wikis. There isn't much that can go wrong, so it can be fully automated.
