User:Elitre (WMF)/Boost initiative

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Improving the translation support for <wiki>[edit]

The Content Translation tool has been successful in supporting the translation process for many Wikipedia communities, and we want to collaborate with <wiki> editors with a new initiative to improve the tool based on your particular needs.

Content Translation facilitates the creation of Wikipedia articles by translating content from other languages. It has been used already to create more than half a million articles. In addition, the tool provides mechanisms to encourage the creation of good quality content, preventing the publication of lightly edited machine translations. In general, our analysis shows that the translations produced are less likely to be deleted than the articles started from scratch.

<wiki> editors have used Content Translation to create <number of articles> articles. Given the size of the editing community, we think that there is potential to use translation to create more articles, expand existing ones, and attract new editors that learn how to make productive edits. Translation can help the community to reduce the language gap with other languages and grow the number of editors in a sustainable way. In order to achieve this goal, we want to collaborate with you to:

  • Make Content translation more visible in the <wiki>. This involves making the tool available by default, expose the tool more visibly at relevant places, surface relevant content gaps, and customize the process to meet the needs of the community. In this way, more editors will be able to find relevant content to translate.
  • Increase the coverage of content for existing articles. Explore ideas to expand existing articles by translating new sections. This will enable users to expand existing articles with new aspects to cover the topic in more detail.
  • Support translation on more devices. Support translation from mobile devices to provide more opportunities for contribution on any device, enabling new editors to participate.

We want to share our goals early with the community. The details for the next steps will be defined as part of this collaboration with the community, and we also plan to start a research process to better understand the particular needs of the community.

As an initial step we are interested in hearing your impressions about the following:

  • Does the idea of improving translation support in the ways described above seems promising as a way to sustainably grow for <wiki>?
  • Do you anticipate any concerns we should consider?

Please let us know your impression about the proposed initiative and feel free to share any comment in this conversation thread.

We'd like to hear from you[edit]

Hi User:Elitre (WMF)/Boost initiative,

The Language team is starting a new initiative to expand the use of translation to help the <wiki> community and others to grow. Your feedback is very important for us since you have been creating a good number of translations with the Content translation tool. Please join the conversation on your local community page or the project talk page at mediawiki.org, and provide your impressions. Thanks! On behalf of the Language team.