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Community Wishlist/Wishes/Revamp the translation system for non-language-specific wikis

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Revamp the translation system for non-language-specific wikis Submitted

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Description

Most wikis are in one language, which makes translation very easy. If you want to translate a page or article, just create it anew on the wiki for that language. (On Wikipedia, en:Special:ContentTranslation can even speed it up!)

In contrast, for wikis in many languages, the current state of translation is a mess. Namely, these are Commons, Meta-Wiki, Wikidata, Wikifunctions, Wikispecies, and Wikitech. Currently, I'm aware of several translation systems. All of them have many issues. None of them can interact with any other.

  • The most common way is the Translate extension. This is installed on Commons, Meta-Wiki, Wikidata, Wikifunctions, and translatewiki.net. It's mainly used for project and help pages, as well as main pages on Meta-Wiki. (These are often, though not always, first written in English.)
    • Some pros:
      • For translators, the UI/UX is very clean and friendly.
      • There is a central dashboard of translation metrics, which is Special:MessageGroupStats. If you pick a language, the dashboard becomes a table where "message groups" are the rows and statuses are the columns. This is extremely useful.
    • Some cons:
      • It is quite difficult to mark a page for translation. This needs a "translation administrator", who might be hard to find or ask.
      • It's also hard to edit a page that has been marked for translation. This is because translate tag syntax is hard to wrap your head around.
  • On Commons, there are a few other systems:
    • Descriptions for files and categories are translated using commons:Template:Multilingual description. This provides a drop-down for readers to choose their own language. This template is pretty easy to master. Category names are always in English, though.
    • Templates themselves can be translated in several ways. All of these methods are pretty difficult.
      • commons:Template:Autotranslate (which needs you to create a "layout template").
      • commons:Template:LangSwitch
      • The Translate extension, which I mentioned earlier, is sometimes used.
      • The template's message may be put into the MediaWiki namespace (if I understand correctly). Then, that can be translated on translatewiki.
  • On Wikidata and Wikifunctions, translations are added as "labels" and "descriptions". This is also very easy to get used to. However, there is no central dashboard. Also, wikidata:Special:EntitiesWithoutLabel is rather unhelpful. Most entities don't have a label in any given language anyways, even for popular languages.
  • Wikispecies and Wikitech are effectively English-only websites. This cuts off everyone who doesn't speak English, which is a lot of people.
  • Meta user pages are displayed identically on all wikis. However, this has a major problem. User pages are often written in English, but most wikis are not in English. This makes the user page feel out of place. What I would like is to write my meta user page in English, but when I visit French Wikipedia, to see a version of my user page in French.


To fix this, I suggest we create a new translation system for all multilingual wikis. Some things I would like this new system to do:

  • It should be uniform. People should be able to translate all kinds of content, regardless of its type or namespace, using this system. (This includes mainspace pages, templates, categories, project/help pages, user pages, and so on.)
  • It should be easy to use.
    • It should be easy to mark a page for translation.
    • It should be easy to edit a page that is already marked for translation.
    • It should be easy to make a translation in your own language(s).
    • It should be easy to fix a bad translation.
  • It should be backwards compatible with the systems we have. In other words, we should be able to move all existing translations to the new system once it is created. Also, we should not have to lose any page history during the move.
  • It should have equal support for all languages. As a result, English should stop being the lingua franca (as it is right now).
  • It should be seamless. For example, if you change your language to French, everything you see should instantly switch to French. In particular, this rules out commons:Template:Multilingual description. That template creates its own drop-down menu, which I think is bad.
  • It should have a central dashboard. This would help each translator easily find content that needs to be translated into their own language. Also, it could be a kind of motivation.


If a system is created, I would really appreciate whoever makes it. Not only me, but much of the global Wikimedia community would too.

Assigned focus area

Unassigned.

Type of wish

System change

Wikifunctions, Wikispecies, Meta-Wiki, Wikimedia Cloud Services, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata

Affected users

translators; non-English-speaking readers

Other details

  • Created: 04:31, 2 August 2024 (UTC)
  • Last updated: 04:46, 2 August 2024 (UTC)
  • Author: Duckmather (talk)
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