I confess, I will refuse to use it because of the additional workload that doesn't justify the benefit. Specifically, it's the retrieval of the revision id of the English article. This is a step I'm not willing to do. Such manual thing is something for automation, not for manual tedium.
- With the intended use, if there is a change in the English article, the corresponding translated article will show up as outdated. No matter if the change is relevant for the translation or not, you have to edit the translated article to make it go away from the list of outdated articles. And you have to do it, otherwise the article stays on the outdated list, which thwarts the reason for the macro in the first place. So every single change of an English article requires an edit of the corresponding translated article. And the work is not just touch the translated article, you have to retrieve the revision id of the English article, edit the translated article and replace the revision id. Is there anybody who really does this? Nope. Not really. Once, twice, but then not any more.
- Get rid of the fixed revision id value. Instead, query the revision id of the translated article and query the revision id of the English article. Compare them. Revision id's seem wiki global, so if someone created an up to date translated article, its revision id is higher than the English article. In this case, assign the "translation up to date" category or just no category. If it's lower, it means the English article has been updated since, and the translated article can be assigned the "outdated translation" category.
- To get a translated article off the "outdated" category, even if the change of the English article isn't relevant, you need to make an empty edit of the translated article to create a new revision id. But that's not different to the current workflow, where it is the same, just the edit will contain the changed revision id value, which is a chore to retrieve in the first place. Just touching the article is actually something I would do, since there is always some trivial thing to improve in any article, so no edit will be just for the bureaucracy but actually serves a productive purpose.
From the size of the article diff it depends what I will do next. If there are minor changes, I just edit the German article and edit this minor thing. If there were sentences and paragraphs added, I copy the German text into Notepad++, add the English text from the diff (translated by Deepl, then edited manually) and paste it back.
If there are major changes, I copy the German text into Notepad++ as well but do a major overhaul of the whole article or major parts of that article, where it is often faster to just translate everything again instead of painstakingly search for every change and edit every change individually. This is 50% of all articles, while the "minor changes" is the other 50%, so a generated diff link would help in 50% of all cases at least for me.
While doing translations, I see that many English articles are outdated as well after Space Age, so I have to first fix the English article, then follow the German translation, otherwise translating would make no sense. To be efficient with that, I need to open many browser tabs with many different pages and editors, and to additionally retrieve the revision id for the verification template is finally a thing that's just too much with not enough use.
So if I will get to an article with that template present, I have the choice to leave it or remove it. Or to edit that macro according to my proposal, then I would add it to every article I will visit (and I will visit every single German article over the course of the next half year) , but without any revision id parameter. Updating the id is something I will not do.
So what should I do? (if you order me to use the verification template as it is and add the revision id, I have to stop translating)