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Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Translation

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Community Wishlist Survey 2023
Translation
8 proposals, 211 contributors, 387 support votes
The survey has closed. Thanks for your participation :)



ContentTranslation Article size

  • Problem: I wish that Special:ContentTranslation main page shows the article's size, so I can make better decision of which article I have to translate with my free time.
  • Proposed solution: Show next to the title or the progress bar the size of the article to translate in the ContentTranslation main page.
  • Who would benefit: Editors who want to schedule what articles could translate every time.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets: phab:T360570
  • Proposer: --Aniol (talk) 08:23, 11 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Voting

ContentTranslation for Wikivoyage

  • Problem: Currently, it is not possible to use ContentTranslation in Wikivoyage projects.
  • Proposed solution: Make ContentTranslation compatible for Wikivoyage
  • Who would benefit: The entire Wikivoyage community, new users and editors interested in translating articles from other sister projects.
  • More comments: The translation extension would be very useful for regular editors and would facilitate learning for new users who want to create articles that are in a different language than their own. This proposal has been well supported in previous requests in the past years 2020 and 2022.
  • Phabricator tickets: T106469; T105171, T322537
  • Proposer: Hispano76 (talk) 21:20, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Voting

Support copying references to other languages with the correct format

  • Problem: The field tags and their order of placement in a citation vary from language to language
  • Proposed solution: An easily accessible toolbox by which any editor can copy a citation reference into one of two parallel boxes; define the source and target languages; drag and drop the content from first box to the second box, in which the corresponding tags are highlighted/matched and listed in proper order
  • Who would benefit: everyone translating articles from one language site to another
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets: task T243150
  • Proposer: Baekemm (talk) 00:03, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • Thanks for your proposal! Could you clarify the context to Thesaurus? We use Thesaurus to find synonymes of words. I am curious about how this is related to the citations. Also am I assuming correctly that your proposal is related the Translate Extension? @Baekemm: KSiebert (WMF) (talk) 11:43, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Perhaps I used the word thesauraus incorrectly. The term "concordance" might be more appropriate. Here is an example (from two articles about Mary Nighy) of the same reference in two different wikipedias. Modifying one (or usually more) "<ref>" for re-use in an imported and translated article always takes time to edit and I wonder whether it could be done more efficiently with some sophisticated tool:
    *:en.wikipedia *:<ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/14334 | accessdate=22 May 2009 | title=Breakthrough Brits | date=30 May 2008 | publisher=[[UK Film Council]] | url-status=dead | archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20110609204759/http://www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/14334 | archivedate=9 June 2011 }}</ref>

    *:de.wikipedia *:<ref>{{Internetquelle |url=http://www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/14334 |titel=Breakthrough Brits |archiv-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110609204759/http://www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/14334 |archiv-datum=2011-06-09 |werk=ukfilmcouncil |abruf=2023-01-22 }}</ref> *:
    (I am not familiar with Translate Extension, so I can't answer the second question)
    @KSiebert (WMF) Kind regards, --Baekemm (talk) 17:11, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Here is second example of the different templates for the same literature reference used at different wikipedia sites (article about Betye Saar)
    *::en.wikipedia *::<ref name=":5">{{cite journal |last1=Dallow |first1=Jessica |title=Reclaiming Histories: Betye and Alison Saar, Feminism, and the Representation of Black Womanhood |journal=Feminist Studies |date=2004 |volume=30 |issue=1 |pages=75–113 |jstor=3178559 }}</ref> *::
    *::de.wikipedia *::<ref>{{Literatur |Autor=Jessica Dallow |Titel=Reclaiming Histories: Betye and Alison Saar, Feminism, and the Representation of Black Womanhood |Sammelwerk=Feminist Studies |Band=30 |Nummer=1 | Jahr=2004 | Seiten=75–113 |JSTOR=3178559 }}</ref> *::
    --Baekemm (talk) 21:42, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks for the proposal @Baekemm!
    Based on the discussion above, I'd propose to rename the proposal to "Support copying references to other languages with the correct format". Feel free to suggest an alternative if you think it is not helping to clarify or does not reflect the purpose of the request.
    @Pginer-WMF Yes, the new name is much clearer. Thank you!--Baekemm (talk) 15:55, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    This proposal seems also related to a more broad proposal about support mapping templates across languages as they are pasted in Visual Editor. In this case, would it solve the original problem if you could copy the English "Cite web" reference and by pasting it to the German article the "Internetquelle" reference was created there with all the information copied to the equivalent parameters?
    That is correct. If minor edits are still needed, that would still be easier.--Baekemm (talk) 15:55, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Currently you can try how automatic template mapping works in Content Translation. There is also a related exploration for editors to be able to correct/augment the mapping information since the automatic mapping relies on metadata and won't cover all parameters for all templates. Pginer-WMF (talk) 10:42, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

Visual Editor should automatically map templates when pasting content form other languages

  • Problem: When translating a page form one language to another using the visual editor, it is possible to copy (and then adapt) the text. The problem with this is that the text is copied as is, including the templates, which might be references. Since templates are different from wiki to wiki, the user may need to find the equivalent template and adjust the contents based on the target template name and their parameters. There should be an easy way to copy a bare reference from source language to target language.
  • Proposed solution: Provide a way to simply add/copy a reference from source to target language which requires minimal manual intervention.
  • Who would benefit: Anyone translating
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets: task T243150
  • Proposer: Eptalon (talk) 21:19, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • @Eptalon: Thanks for your proposal! Since there are several different ways to make a translation, it would be great for the description to clarify some aspects. Is the translation process you describe based on opening with Visual Editor the source and the target articles to make a translation or is Content Translation involved in the process? Please let us know if the scenario you described would be represented in this example: a user opens the English version of the Avocado article with Visual Editor by clicking on "edit" and copies content that includes templates. Then, opens the French version of the article in the same way and pastes the English content to start editing them to make a translation. The templates pasted are expected to be converted into the equivalent French Wikipedia templates. --Pginer-WMF (talk) 11:28, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    This is like globalizing and localizing templates to other language wikis, I think... Thingofme (talk) 15:44, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Eptalon: I made some adjustments trying to clarify the proposal. Please let me know if I misinterpreted anything, or something can be captured in a better way. thanks!
  • It feel this apply to ContentTranslate too, and is one of the main reason why some wiki are upset with people translating articles from other language versions.C933103 (talk) 05:34, 7 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I still don't get this proposal. What's a "bare reference"? Aaron Liu (talk) 20:24, 10 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm a bit shocked this didn't end up in the larger wishes section, as I can't imagine how this would be done without a huge effort to to build a mapping between template parameters on different wikis; in the end, it would need some weak version of global templates. Certainly would be nice, though. --Tgr (talk) 03:59, 11 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I will perhaps clarify: In English, there's a template, I think sfn, which inserts & formats a reference (according to some rule of what the reference should look like). DeWp does not have the template, so the referencem, if it ends up in the German translation at all, is broken. Now imagine you translate a longer article, which is properly referenced in English, but in German it lost all these templates (which requires a large amount of work, but translating already is a huge amout of effort). Now imagine that the subject you translate contains some controversial sections, which are properly referenced in the source language, but end up unreferenced in the target language. As to the "dictionary", you could have the user propose an equivalent template, mapping the parameters should be easy.--Eptalon (talk) 19:01, 11 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

Content translation: Editing content in wiki syntax

  • Problem: In the Content translation tool, It is not possible to edit some page content in the wiki code. Editing in wiki code can be faster and more comfortable, e.g. when filling/copying some sample call of some template.
  • Proposed solution: No special implementation requirements
  • Who would benefit: Users. For example newcomers to familiarizing themselves with templates.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Dušan Kreheľ (talk) 20:46, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • @Dušan Kreheľ: Could you elaborate on your first point a bit, about not being able to edit some content in wikitext? What content do you mean? There are some pages that are not wikitext but are other formats such as CSS, Lua, etc. but these are generally editable in much the same way as wikitext. Is your proposal about making better documentation about editing wikitext? SWilson (WMF) (talk) 01:20, 6 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • It would be helpful, currently it is hard to edit reference and template in content translate, also need extra procedures to rearrange sections. C933103 (talk) 05:48, 7 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Supporting wikitext editing in Content Translation is not trivial since the content is annotated for the translation process (e.g., to know which paragraph in the translation corresponds to in the original text). That makes it hard to include that metadata in wikitext without crowding the content, and keeping it in place after content is added or removed. Supporting all this in a clean way makes this a task larger beyond the scope of a standard proposal. In addition, the main focus of the tool is to allow users to create an initial version of the article they can later expand on using the regular editors (visual or wikitext), and currently it is possible to publish translaiton contents as a draft under the user namespace (using the publish settings) and edit the content further before it is published as an article. If there is interest around this area we may want to explore which are possible approaches to make some progress in this direction. --Pginer-WMF (talk) 16:51, 9 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @Pginer-WMF: When translating a paragraph, I will assume that the empty paragraph, i.e. no (automatic) translation. And I edit it as I want (clicking or RAW wiki). Sometimes it is simply easier and faster to copy the data from the previous foreign language call to a clean local template. It is not correct to rely on the fact that the source and target templates have mutually equivalent templates implemented and possibly their mutual pairing is also set.
    Other things are easier for a beginner (typography; checking and editing data).
    Hm, your description is different from the name of the tool. Instead of "Translate tool" it could then be called "Tool for starting to translate articles". Under the term "Translate tool", I imagine that it is a (professionally intended) tool for translation. In addition, the interface is included in the Visual Editor, so it can give the impression that it is easy to use for translation. Not to mention that this tool annoys people, so why not use it? (Rhetorical question) Dušan Kreheľ (talk) 17:48, 9 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

Translatable language names

  • Problem: Many language names do not have translations in MediaWiki. Wikidata, Commons structured data and the {{#language:...}} syntax often fall back to English instead. Translations cannot be easily added.
  • Proposed solution: Language names should be translatable on translatewiki.net. The CLDR data could be used to provide the initial set of translations so that only missing names need to be translated. Updates to CLDR could be used to update unedited translations and add translations that are missing.
  • Who would benefit: Speakers of languages other than English.
  • More comments: MediaWiki fetches translations of language names from CLDR. CLDR does not support all languages that MediaWiki supports and does not have (and does not intend to have) translations for all language names. The LocalNamesXx.php files can only be edited by submitting patches.
  • Phabricator tickets: phab:T231755, phab:T231748, phab:T324892, phab:T157809, phab:T256649
  • Proposer: Nikki (talk) 00:35, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • @Nikki: one of the challenges in this area is to keep the translations in sync with CLDR. Currently it seems there is no way to automatically submit our translations to CLDR to update the translations. Given that limitation, it may be possible to make language names translatable in translatewiki.net to fill the missing languages with the caveat that translations from CLDR may overwrite them once they become available. Do you think an approach like this would still be valuable to support the request? Thanks! --Pginer-WMF (talk) 14:38, 26 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @Pginer-WMF Yes, I think it would be worth it. There are a lot of language names that CLDR doesn't have (~300 out of the ~700 that Wikidata supports) and there are a lot more language codes we would like to be added. Ideally it would use the CLDR data to update translatewiki (rather than using the CLDR name regardless of what translatewiki has), then it would be similar to someone manually changing your translations after you've done them. - Nikki (talk) 14:40, 29 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Perfect. Thanks for the input @Nikki! Pginer-WMF (talk) 10:05, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

Label "New Article" by default with transition to "Needs improvement"

  • Problem: Many translated articles are created as "stubs", and the editors creating them forgot to mark them to signal that work will still be carried out. This is problematic for the reviewing process: reviewers spend time on reviewing a version that is still in the works, and they may mark it for deletion.
  • Proposed solution: Mark translations automatically in a way that encourages a better coordination of the review process. That is, allowing translators to have time to improve their initial versions while helping reviewers to focus on those where translators had enough time to do so.
  • Who would benefit: The work of the patrolmen to check the new articles, which may still be being worked on, will be reduced. Editors who prematurely nominate articles for removal. A large number of articles for withdrawal do not appear in the database.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets: task T287236
  • Proposer: BlackStar1991 (talk) 19:30, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • Since this request would seem to be part of mw:Content translation, I'm going to move this proposal to the Translation category. I will add however that the proposal seems to be contingent on local community processes, and thus may need prior conensus before it can be implemented. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 17:00, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • @BlackStar1991: I understand that the purpose of the proposal is to make reviewers aware that a given page is a recent translaiton where the user may sill be working on it. Do you think that an approach similar to what is described in task T287236 (but applied to the desktop experience) would be helping with the problem described in this request? Thanks. -- Pginer-WMF (talk) 09:30, 26 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • @BlackStar1991: I tried to clarify the proposal. Please let me know if I misinterpreted anything, or something can be captured in a better way. By editing the proposal I tried to capture the essence of the issue and the general approach to solve it but avoided too many details for the solution, leaving room to explore options and technical possibilities. For reference I copy here the specific details of the proposed solution that I removed from the proposal: "Add the label "New article" to ALL new articles that are translations, which will be set on this article for 168 hours, after which the bot removes this label from it and compares it with articles in foreign Wikipedias. The comparison is based on the amount of content (characters) per paragraph. If there is clearly more information in a foreign-language article, then the translated article is marked Translate from this foreign-language version of Wikipedia. The bot starts comparing from Good articles, and then all available ones. If the contents of the +- articles are the same in size, the "New article" label is simply removed. While the New Article label is set on the article, the article cannot be nominated for removal. Only for Quick withdrawal." --Pginer-WMF (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 10:52, 3 February 2023 (UTC).[reply]

Voting

Allow each wiki and each translatable article to have more than one source language

  • Problem: Currently, the translation system assumes each translatable wiki is based on a single source language, and each translatable article must have been written in a single source language. On a wiki such as the Meta-Wiki, this assumption breaks down because it does not correspond to reality.

    For example, there is circumstantial evidence that ContribuLing 2023 was originally written in French, then subsequently translated into English because Meta-Wiki requires translatable pages to be in English. But the system presents the English page as source. This poses problems for translators because although English is in theory a much more accessible language, parts of the article are difficult to understand until they realize they need to and should consult the French page for clarification.

    Another example is Wikimedia Taiwan/The Chinese Wikimedia Open Meeting on the 2021 Foundation Official Action/Documentation. The true source article was about 50% English, 50% Chinese. What happened was the Chinese parts on the source page were subsequently translated into English, then on the Chinese “translation” (in reality only 50% of it is a translation) the English parts were translated into Chinese. Now the system claims that the Chinese page “is a translation”, which is a false claim. The system is mis-stating the facts, and translators wouldn’t know parts of the English “source” page are in fact not authoritative.

  • Proposed solution: It would be helpful to allow content creators to tag articles and individual segments as being themselves translations, and specify which “translation” page is in fact the true source. When translators attempt a translation the system would tell them the article or the segment was in fact not written in English, and if they could, they could consult the true source segment at, say, the French “translation”. This would also allow these translators to add useful documentation as they see fit.
  • Who would benefit: Content creators and translators
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets: phab:T329944
  • Proposer: Al12si (talk) 21:00, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Note you can already specify arbitrary source language for translation at Special:PageLanguage, see also Special:Log/pagelang. However, it is currently not possible to have more than one source languages in one single page.--GZWDer (talk) 18:22, 17 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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