The translations of MediaWiki messages for many languages are not complete. When the translation is not complete, messages are displayed in the fallback language (often English), in the same font, same color and same size. If the user knows the fallback language well, he may hardly notice this, although he is the one who can translate the message.
It's possible to encourage users to complete the translation. One way to do it is to put a link saying something like "translate this message" near every untranslated message. The link should point directly to the message page in translatewiki.net, the de-facto MediaWiki translation website. Yes, this will put a lot of those links on the wiki and this may be ugly, but the users can get rid of them by completing the translation, which they should do anyway.
This link must be also displayed for outdated or broken ("FUZZY") messages, and for extensions messages and not just the core.
This is not just a way to encourage people to complete their translations. It will be actually easier to translate the software this way, because then the message is seen in context and not in a dry list of strings, as it is in TranslateWiki now.
One problem with this approach is that the translation is not updated immediately. It's not terrible, because the way things work now, it will be updated after a few days, but if someone has a clever way to fix that, it would be nice.
Another problem is text in special areas such as buttons, links and input box boilerplate (for example, the word "Search" in the Vector search box). But that can be handled somehow.
People who like to improve translation may also get the opportunity to enable such a link for all messages, even translated ones. Something like this exists on Facebook; it sucks there, but who said we can't do better?
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement