Topic on Extension talk:Translate

There's something that has bothered me for a long time, and only now I am finally speaking up.

There's a recommendation to put {{#translation:}} at the end of categories on translatable pages. It was defined as a "recommendation" by Nemo in 2015.

I more or less understand the rationale for this: if you don't use this syntax, all the translated pages end up in the same category, making the category listing long, repetitive, and hard to use.

But it also has some problems:

• The category for each language has to be created separately and manually.
  • If this is not done, there are a lot of non-existent ("red") categories.
• The [[Category:Name{{#translation:}}]] syntax is kind of ugly and not self-explanatory.
• Ugly or not, it has to be added to every translatable page, overloading it with yet more wiki syntax, in addition to <languages />, <translate>, <tvar>, etc. (I mean, technically, it doesn't have to be added there, but since it's recommended, people who want to follow the recommendation do it on a lot of pages.)

I realize that it will probably require some development, but could it become simpler?

The simplest thing I can think of is that categories would show just the original page and not the translations. Or, if I'm missing some issues with this, maybe the translated categories could be auto-created.

Are there any other thoughts?

@Kaganer, @Nikerabbit, @Shirayuki, I'd like to hear your opinions.

For example, Category:WMF Projects 2022q1 and friends do not have translation pages.

If there are many pages, it would be useful to filter by language (in my case, Japanese and English). Some languages may have more than one fallback language.

As one of the translation administrators, I like the current spec because I can see how many pages of a particular language are in a category.

Yeah, but wouldn't it be more convenient if they were at least created automatically?

And wouldn't it be better if instead of using categories, you could see a proper statistics page to see how many pages of a particular language are in a category?

Categories (primarly) - is very useful and comfortable navigational way. Not for translate admins - for readers. Many people do not have the experience or the habit of reading in foreign languages. And they need not just a clear entry point, but a way to see "what else is useful in my language?"

The fact that the categories mechanism did not fall apart in any way (and was, in fact, ignored in the mobile application for years) is a big mistake.

There are many problems with categories, and not only related to translatable pages. For example, the fact that it is almost 20 years since they cannot be made multilingual (writing and displaying). This is the Great Birth Trauma of Wikimedia Commons.

But if you do not make revolutions (although I am for it, as I should be, given my origin), then I would suggest this approach:

1. Eliminate the need to use in category descriptions (but leave it as a possible option, for backwards compatibility)
2. If the translatable page is included in a category that is also marked for translation, then the bot should automatically...
   1. ...add language suffix for category name in a subpages with translations
   2. ...create language subcategories for each of the subpages that appear (if they don't already exist)

This task may be performed with the processing operation (re)marking new version for translation.