A way to filter out edits to languages one doesn't speak or integrated machine translation for these (Community Wishlist/W425)

Description

On Wikidata, in the Watchlist there are many edits to aliases and descriptions and so on for languages one doesn't understand. If it was possible to to filter out languages you don't understand from the Watchlist, it would make the WD Watchlist much more managable, overseeable, and time-efficient, saving lots of precious volunteer time they can use for actually contributing to Wikidata and making it less exhausting to quickly check the Watchlist.

Alternatively or additionally, one could have machine translations for the respective values displayed so users can understand and check the items, especially for spotting vandalism. I already spotted several cases of vandalism on Wikidata by copying the text into Google Translate. Firefox now also has a right click context menu option "Translate Selection to English" (or whatever your configured preferred language is) which for some (just a few) languages can also be used.

There actually is a script for filtering out languages but not only does the vast majority of Wikidata users not know about it, it quite simply doesn't work. I detailed its issues on its talk page and also asked in Project chat if somebody could fix them, but the simple summary is that even when it filters out some items from the Watchlist, many if not most items that should be hidden aren't hidden.

An issue here is that just filtering out all items where the latest edit is one to a language one can't understand would also filter out items where previously things were edited in a language one does understand such as values for genre or main subject or the item's description in your language. Ideally, all the changes of languages you don't understand would be filtered out from a multi-edit diff of all unseen changes but that has the same or similar problems why wish A way to filter edits by Citation bot, InternetArchiveBot and OAbot from diffs is currently blocked. However, I think it could theoretically be done via another method: not by checking what the usertype of the included diffs is but by checking the language tag of the diff content element. So for example if one user added an English description and another user added an Arabic alias the diff from the last seen revision to the current revision (related wish) would only show the change to the English description to the user who has configured only say English and Spanish as their languages because the change to the Arabic alias can be filtered out as it appears under aliases / ar / 1 in the diff which is picked up by the filter to remove that part of the diff from the diff the user ultimately sees. The image on the right illustrates what is meant here. Likewise, on the Watchlist, only items would be filtered away where there have been only changes to languages one doesn't understand.

Assigned focus area

Make it easier for patrollers and other editors to prioritize tasks

Type of wish

Feature request