voting on a string

[Jeroen Vermeulen]

henning at ubuntu.com wrote:
> Hi all,
> currently there are no plans to implement something like this but it
> might be worth explaining the idea in a blueprint so that it won't get lost.

Frankly I'm a bit worried that this would be spreading the translation 
effort too thin.  The current process is: translator (any logged-in 
user) submits a suggestion, after which a member of the translation team 
checks whether it should go in.  If you expect more people to sign off, 
that opens the door to lots of people working on the same fraction of 
strings without achieving as much as they would as reviewers.

That's assuming those voters are aware enough of applicable terminology 
and style standards etc. to be reviewers.  But if most aren't, then the 
voting is really only helpful for the cases that a good reviewer 
instantly recognizes as correct anyway.

Finally, there's a technical issue with a cost trade-off: we have 
millions and millions of translated messages for every Ubuntu release, 
with large numbers of people involved.  If this feature sees serious 
use, we'd have to store millions and millions of votes: "person X 
already voted for translation Y."  That will slow down the site--maybe 
so little that you wouldn't notice, or maybe so much that it annoys lots 
of people.


Jeroen