Regularly scan source articles of translated articles for notes when important new content was added (Community Wishlist/W525)

Description

Many articles that were translated, especially in smaller Wikipedias or not ENWP, quickly become outdated where the source article that originally was translated got updated but these changes have not been translated so the source article is up-to-date or but the translated article is not (or is missing important info).

Often such changes to the source article are not important and don't really need to be translated or the info be also added to the translated article. However, it's also often the case that the new or revised information in the source article is important.

One idea would be to scan source articles of translated articles and see whether there have been substantial changes since the revision that the article was translated. Then, if that's the case there could be some kind of warning note on the page that contributors can see so they can check (similar to patrolling) if there is some info missing and/or create a notification about it for the author of the translated article and display a note in the watchlist for users watchlisting the article.

Technical/functionality outline

Large articles that have a lots of contributors that update them could be exempted – so if an article about a large broad subject like 'Artificial intelligence' or 'Software' or 'Ukraine' was first created via some translation then one would probably still not want to see such notes for them.

Identification of translated articles: Articles that were translated can be identified through the use of the ContentTranslation tool and in the case of German Wikipedia de:Wikipedia:Importwünsche where the revision history of the source article is 'imported'. I don't know how it's like in other Wikipedias so these are just two examples/ways. One could also check if the first two revisions' edit summaries' include some words like 'translated' or 'translation'.
Identification and classification of changes in source article: The tool would check the changes since that revision on that page and if some threshold and criteria are met, it would register that substantial changes have been made since translation. Bots just changing citation template parameters and some copyediting and an added sentence probably would not count as changed substantially (at least when that sentence addition is marked as minor change or not in the lead).
Creation, display and functionalities of notes: Maybe in the note the changes at the source page could be summarized; a diff for all these unreviewed changes may be too large and unoverseeable due to things being moved around. I think such has recently become possible with some AI advancements. More broadly, there could be help in easily seeing which changes have been made to the source article and getting the respective info (and it doesn't have to be a translation of that content) into the target article where it may be missing (which needs checking which could also be aided via tools that try to find the respective info in the translated article).

Usage of the notes

The note doesn't need to be acted upon. It's just some useful info. It could also be made possible to mark things as 'reviewed' so that the note disappears and so that from then on only changes from that revision on are again scanned for substantial changes.

Issues and challenges with this

An issue with all of this is that updates to a good-quality up-to-date article doesn't depend on the other language version article being translated from it or not – there can also be updates to a language version (especially/usually ENWP mostly except for lang/region-specific topics) that are missing in other language versions. And vice versa being a translated article doesn't mean contributors to the respective language version Wikipedia aren't keeping it up to date aside from keeping it fairly in sync with the source article it was translated from. So I'm doubtful about this wish. The problem is real but maybe scoped in a flawed way...I was just trying to see if there's a way address this problem in a more traditional way and within the bounds of normal Wikipedias instead of as described here which would be a separate site(s) or subsite(s) other than the standard language Wikipedia version.

NOTE: If you have inputs on how to improve upon this outline, or have related/alternative ideas about the problem, or know how this could become feasible, or can address the doubts, please comment on the talk page. I'm unsure whether to submit this or not but decided to do so and if this gets declined for being too unclear or infeasible that's okay with me too. Maybe it inspires some thought that leads to a better way to address the issue. For example, one way to address the doubts would be to enable users to configure which article they want to get these notes for – e.g. a person translating an article from English Wikipedia could enable getting notes when the source article gets changed extensively so they can review the changes every once in a while (without having to watchlist the source article and regularly checking the Watchlist on that Wikipedia or that article's revision history).

Assigned focus area

Unassigned

Type of wish

Feature request