Translatable modules/Stakeholders

The Translatable modules project is trying to build a new framework for module localization. It affects various groups of people and should be reviewed by some of them.

User group	Explanation	How will the user experience be affected	Details
Module and template developers	People who often edit in the Module and Template namespace. Known as “engineers” in some wikis.	The current code will keep working. New features will become available.	The point of this project is to change how human-readable messages are used in the modules’ code. The change must be optional, minimal, and easy to learn and transition to.
Translators of core MediaWiki, extensions, and wiki pages	People who localize core MediaWiki and extensions on translatewiki.net, and translate pages on Wikimedia multilingual sites.	The user experience for the current workflows will not change significantly, and new workflows for module translation will build on the existing ones.	The changes made for this project should make it easy for these people to translate modules using a consistent user interface.
Template and module translators	People who contribute translations of human-readable messages that appear in modules and templates to their languages. There is often significant overlap between these people and general editors on these wikis. They often also contribute to other Wikimedia sites and to translatewiki.net.	Nothing will change in modules that don’t adopt the new technology. New user experience will become available in modules that will adopt the new technology.	The experience must become easy and unified, to involve as little coding as possible, and to get similar to localizing core MediaWiki and extensions.
Translation administrators	People who don’t necessarily develop modules and templates, but who do organize translatable pages, remove things that don’t need to be translated, change English messages to be more easily translatable, add documentation, and help other translators. These people also often belong to the General editors, Module and template developers, and Translators groups.	The user experience for page translation workflows will not change significantly, and it must be easy to learn new workflows for module translation organization.	Currently this community role exists for translatable pages, and in a certain, haphazard way for templates, but not so much for modules. For modules, this is currently done mostly by Module and template developers, and for each module the experience is different. The experience must become unified, and at least partly decoupled from module development.
Translate extension developers and maintainers	The people who write the code for the Translate extension.	Significant changes will be required in the extension.	Current Translate extension features must keep working generally without change. Some changes will have to be planned and implemented to start supporting module translation. Support for translatable modules should not cause increased maintenance needs long-term.
Wikimedia site reliability and performance engineers	People who measure the performance of Wikimedia sites and make sure that they run quickly and smoothly.	Page rendering performance must not be negatively affected.	Modules are used (through templates) on almost all pages. Translatable modules must not slow down these pages.
General editors	People who edit pages, upload files, and participate in discussions on talk pages, but don’t contribute to the Module and Template namespace often. However, nearly all editors use templates as editors on all kinds of pages, and templates in turn use modules.	Will not change significantly.	The experience of adding a template to a page or editing the parameters of an already added template must not change significantly.
Readers	All the readers on multilingual Wikimedia sites, especially Commons and Wikidata. Almost all pages there show output of templates and modules in one way or another.	Will not change significantly.	Things that are already translated must stay translated. Making things easier to translate will lead to a more quickly localized user experience for them.
Abstract Wikipedia developers	The AW product team and community.	N/A	Nothing exists at the moment so nothing will be affected. However, the work should be coordinated because Abstract Wikipedia (Wikifunctions) may include a shared modules repository.

More information

• Discuss at Talk:Translatable modules.
• Development and design principles
• Current solutions
• Proposed solutions - the part that needs the most discussion and review
• Engineering considerations