To Brion and other people who think the page translation markup is annoying and a usability issue: As the (then volunteer) developer who created it, I can only agree.
The way page translations currently works, which is extensively documented at [0], is the result of lots of experimenting with what works and what does not. When developing this feature, I got some first hand experience working with the MediaWiki parser, which was not always easy. Yes, the wikipage translation feature can and should be improved as technology progresses: we now have a visual editor which did not exist when this feature was developed. However, as shown by statistics [1], these issues do not prevent the feature from being used to translate thousands of pages, including the weekly tech news. The markup issue is not a reason to stop using this feature. For this quarter the Language team is going to address high priority issues in Translate that can prevent proper use of the page translation feature [2]. Our team is small and has a huge scope of work. Only with help of others it is possible to proceed faster and cover more ground. To remind us about our visions: we should "make efforts to support the translation of key documents into multiple languages" [3] and we should "provide the essential infrastructure for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects" [4]. I do not wish to spend my time arguing repeatedly for these goals. Instead I want to work on making them happen. My request is that we (especially us English speakers and developers) accept some inconvenience when necessary to support multilingualism. [5] [0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Translate [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_engineering/Reports/2016-March#Usage_data_2 [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/1854/ [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Guiding_Principles [4] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement [5] Not limited to this thread, see https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/214893/ and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T39797 for examples which are stuck for a long time. -Niklas _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
