It can be difficult to see what language variants exist for a message.

In which specific use cases is that a problem? {{Special:PrefixIndex/NameOfYourPage/}} lists all subpages (and hence also translations).

In T260253#6379890, @Aklapper wrote:

In which specific use cases is that a problem? {{Special:PrefixIndex/NameOfYourPage/}} lists all subpages (and hence also translations).

As a user, I had no idea that MediaWiki messages could be translated at all (from a wikipage). Perhaps that's only me, but I wanted to document it in case anyone else had a similar experience.

I'm not a fan of proposing a solution without defining a problem, and in this case two thoughts come to my mind:

• What if there is no custom on-wiki override but the MediaWiki standard translation is used? Don't display a link at all? Display a link might encourage people to overwrite locally though and make less people realize that they can translate/change the default MediaWiki translation on translatewiki.net?
• UI-wise in Wikimedia, that area seems to be typically used for language links to other sites which have the same topic of that page (though not sure how this works on non-language based sites), so this feels like overloading the functionality in that page area with a different meaning?

I think a link to the translations of a message on the current wiki would be useful (particularly e.g. on Meta or Commons, where overridden messages often have translations to many languages, but also e.g. on English Wikipedia for en-gb translations, which are often forgotten and out of date).

However, we should definitely not use the "Languages" section of the sidebar of that, as that's used for links to different wikis. I think it would be confusing to have links to pages on the current wiki.

I would prefer something near the top of the page like "Other languages" box added by the Translate extension (example page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download), or maybe a single link somewhere to Special:PrefixIndex (in the sidebar under "Tools", or in the page subtitle maybe like the breadcrumbs links?).

In fact, looking at https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Centralnotice-WikivoyageMockUp3a-url/de, there is already a breadcrumb link to the parent page https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Centralnotice-WikivoyageMockUp3a-url in the subtitle (this is a normal behavior for subpages). I think following that idea and also adding something in the subtitle on the parent page to link to its subpages would be neat.

In T260253#6380011, @Aklapper wrote:

• What if there is no custom on-wiki override but the MediaWiki standard translation is used? Don't display a link at all? Display a link might encourage people to overwrite locally though and make less people realize that they can translate/change the default MediaWiki translation on translatewiki.net?

To add to the confusion, "Pages" exist for messages that have not been overridden:
https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Createacct-yourpasswordagain-ph
in which case it's impossible to know the subpage:
https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Createacct-yourpasswordagain-ph/ja

Does this encourage people to overwrite locally? I'm not opposed to providing a link to translatewiki.net. Maybe it makes the most sense to only show links if the main message has been overwritten.

• UI-wise in Wikimedia, that area seems to be typically used for language links to other sites which have the same topic of that page (though not sure how this works on non-language based sites), so this feels like overloading the functionality in that page area with a different meaning?

I'm not sure most users care that these links lead to other sites. That seems like an implementation detail. Though as @matmarex has pointed out, we could do something similar to ContentTranslation.