Topic on Project:Village Pump

We've been using the translate extension for a while now on this wiki, which definitely needs more multilingual support, so I think we should greatly expand its usage, by deciding where to start. The aim is to reach more MediaWiki users (rather than developers); benefits have to be balanced by costs, and in some areas the extension is easier to use than in others (or even easier than continuing with {{Languages}} and so on). Some ideas:

1. Most viewed pages: I've done some, but they often need an update/revamp in English too.
2. Configuration variables: hundreds of them have the corresponding Manual: page translated and can be assumed of interest. The pages use a common pattern and most important info is in the template, so – in principle – translations can be moved to the new system (semi)automatically.
3. Help pages would be the most useful in theory, but those we have here are very specific and limited. It makes no sense to translate most of them, because the "real help pages" and their translations are in fact on Meta or scattered among Wikipedias (or other Wikimedia projects.

About #3: What about the users of non-WMF wikis? Wouldn't translated help pages be helpful for them?

Yes but one should first move the up-to-date and complete English pages here from Meta and other wikis (finding a solution for licensing problems and also convincing them not to keep outdated copies around), which is not going to happen.

You may be right. I think it was a mistake to insist on public domain Help pages, and that we are reaping the harmful consequences of that decision. But to fix it would require acknowledging that a mistake was made, and sometimes people are resistant to that.

I disagree - PD help pages are a very good idea. However, it is a mistake to think they will be of any real use until we provide a workable method of distibuting them. I think it is a fairly safe assumption that if there was an easy way to import the default help pages into your local wiki, in the appropriate language(s), then that would be sufficient encouragement for the current pages to be tidied up (if, indeed, that is necessary - I haven't looked at them for a while) and, more importantly, widely translated.

I don't think think the solution here is to import existing non-English help content from elsewhere, or to try and encourage a translation drive for the help content, without having an export process in place.

Seems we can all agree on this, so we're left with #1 and #2 for now.

So... no interest/ideas/suggestions on those two points (priority pages and manual pages)?

I'm afraid translation isn't my area of expertise. It's been noted that "English is the working language of the Internet", though, and my attitude toward those who seek to administer websites tends to be, learn English or GTFO. But you seem to be on the right track as far as prioritization is concerned; focus on the most-viewed pages first.

Configuration settings summaries have over 23 thousands translations for the Configure extension; it would be nice to find a way to use them on wiki. I've opened bugzilla:43380 to see what's technically feasible.

I'm not familiar with the Translate extension, although I'm looking for an excuse to finally give it a try.  :) Is it possible to promote a set of pages where translation is prioritized? Using a category, for instance.

Trying to translate the whole mediawiki.org is pointless and actually counterproductive, but there is a bunch of pages that would really welcome more translations, and a formal request to be translated. It would be useful for the project and for translator to identify those, and if possible get those nice stats telling that Japanese is 100% up to date, Italian is 83%, Arabic is 12% and so on.

There are two types of translatable pages based on motivation:

1. Promotion: local languages are good to reach out to new users and contributors. Homepage, the hubs, How to contribute, the local Groups (mainly in their respective native languages)...
2. Support: essential pages for users of MediaWiki and our technical infrastructure. The most basic and required pages of the manual, how bugzilla works how to get developer access...

Maybe it's worth having both translatable categories separate? Maybe some languages make total sense for Promotion but less so for Support (no specific examples, although I can imagine Indic or Latin languages speakers needing those translations more for Promotion than Support, since the average sysadmin / developer of those languages is used to deal with English documentation).

It is clear that the deeper you get into both categories the clearer is the need to manage some English, at least in our current reality. We could probably define a VERY LIMITED set of pages translatable here and now in both categories and then consider the addition of new pages based on actual need.

And I agree with Nemo that those pages need a review in the canonical English version before making big calls for translation. But maybe this is a feature? It forces us to go through identified pages, mark them as translatable progressively and giving more time to translators to deal with new content. For instance, we could start focusing in How to contribute and Help:Formatting, and do a first test with these pages.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

Yes, it's possible to "categorize" requests for translations, see for instance m:Special:AggregateGroups. It's also possible to define priority languages and even to disable translations in some languages, but this makes little sense on this wiki. In general, people will always translate what they're interested in, not what you'd most like to have translated, therefore if something would use translations it should be translatable, while for focused translation recruitement you can have a specific priority group of translatable pages.

In short, I don't like that "very limited" in all caps, unless you consider (like me) that e.g. 600 configuration settings pages (out of ten thousands content pages) would be a "very limited" set of translatable pages. ;-) Specific pages ready for translation should made translatable immediately: I'll comment on those two on talk.

Ok, got your point. I just find useful to have a set of pages identified for volunteer translators without own itch or agenda. "I want to start translating MediaWiki content to Catalan: where should I start? Thank you."

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

I've created a high priority group now.

http://stats.grok.se/www.w/top was updated; the Help: and Manual: pages in the top-1000 list should probably be made translatable. Who's willing to help me?

Thank you for this useful link!

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.