Show username of approver on translations
awesomeAD1 opened this issue · comments
Currently, when a translation is approved, there is no way of knowing who did the approving.
While it is custom for a translator to leave a suggestion in the discourse linking to their translation, and subsequently the approver might go look for that suggestion and reply and resolve it, this isn't always done in practice.
However, for reasons of transparency, accountability, and to enable better communication and follow up, it is helpful to know who exactly approved a translation.
I would like to suggest adding a short "approved by <username>" tag on approved translations.
It is my understand that moderators can look up this information, and one might argue it is only necessary for them to know who exactly is approving translations (e.g. for repeated misuse of this privilege), but I'd argue that it is helpful for anyone to know who to approach when there are issues regarding approval of certain translations.
Since many of the active users in this regard are also present on Discord, one could then initiate a discussion with them there if questions or issues arise.
For example, a regular translator in a certain language might be prone to certain anti-patterns, details, or not aware of idiomatic approaches to things. A user who is equally not aware of these things might then approve such translations. After this is done, there is no way to inform them of any issues (leaving a discourse on the translation after approval is likely never going to be noticed by either party). Knowing who all parties are helps in communicating issues.
A counter-argument I could imagine is that this might potentially lead to some form of witch-hunting or similar. While I don't think this would be the case, I'd also argue that if a user would show repeated carelessness or even intentional and regular disregard when approving kata, it would help if regular users could then bring the attention to mods, and for this they'd need the name of the approving user. Not to mention that the mere public record of approval might motivate users to take more care in general when reviewing translations.
The same could be added for "rejected by <username>" for explicitly rejected translations.
Just to clarify some things:
- Approval of a translation is audited and users who have access to activity logs (now these are admins and mods) can track down the info. But it is meant to be used only to prevent abuse of the approval feature, vandalism, or excessive approval of bad code.
- Rejection of a transaction is not audited. It was asked to be added to audit logs, but it hasn't happened yet.
The same could be added for
"rejected by <username>"for explicitly rejected translations.
I would go further and suggest that rejection cannot happen without leaving a discourse comment. Obviously, lazy people will just write . and move on, but ideally this would motivate them to actually justify their reasons (otherwise how is the author to know what to improve)