Last modified: 2013-01-27 03:44:41 UTC
An issue arose on Wikidata because someone had changed the translation section IDs (<!--T:1--> and so on). It wasn't discovered until much later, and is a big mess to clean up. I think that the extension should give users a strong warning when they mark the page for translation and the IDs have been changed, or maybe disallow it entirely. That would hopefully prevent situations like this in the future.
Could you define "changing the translation section IDs"? By the way, <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Translate/Page_translation_administration#Changing_the_source_text> (I think I also added this as required reading to get translation admin status, I hope bureaucrats have not been careless).
This is the definition: <https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata:Glossary&diff=3110912&oldid=2847353> :-) Done with good intentions, of course, but it messed up everything (since I only discovered it today, and reverted, but many translations had come in in the meantime).
How can the extension know that the unit identifier was previously assigned to a unit with a different unrelevant text? The sections content can't be freezed forever. Unless you propose a workable solution I suspect this will be a WONTFIX or INVALID. The documentation states very clearly not to mess up with unit markers, and the most obvious requirement to assign any user right is that one should know what one does (and one's own limits)...
It's difficult, but not impossible. It can be done by checking two revisions (typically the next-latest vs. the latest, but could also be next-latest-marked-for-translation-revision vs. curent-trying-to-mark-for-translation-revision) against each other. If nothing (or very little) has changed except the translation ID, that should raise a red flag.
