Avoid message reuse[edit | edit source]
The translators discourage message reuse. This may seem counter-intuitive, because copying and duplicating code is usually a bad practice, but in system messages it is often needed. Although two concepts can be expressed with the same word in English, this doesn’t mean they can be expressed with the same word in every language. “OK” is a good example: in English this is used for a generic button label, but in some languages they prefer to use a button label related to the operation which will be performed by the button. Another example is practically any adjective: a word like “multiple” changes according to gender in many languages, so you cannot reuse it to describe several different things, and you must create several separate messages.
If you are adding multiple identical messages, please add message documentation to describe the differences in their contexts. Don’t worry about the extra work for translators. Translation memory helps a lot in these while keeping the flexibility to have different translations if needed.
Please see more good suggestions here: Localisation - MediaWiki