[[Project:Translate extension|Translate extension]]
I'm not familiar with the Translate extension, although I'm looking for an excuse to finally give it a try. :) Is it possible to promote a set of pages where translation is prioritized? Using a category, for instance.
Trying to translate the whole mediawiki.org is pointless and actually counterproductive, but there is a bunch of pages that would really welcome more translations, and a formal request to be translated. It would be useful for the project and for translator to identify those, and if possible get those nice stats telling that Japanese is 100% up to date, Italian is 83%, Arabic is 12% and so on.
There are two types of translatable pages based on motivation:
- Promotion: local languages are good to reach out to new users and contributors. Homepage, the hubs, How to contribute, the local Groups (mainly in their respective native languages)...
- Support: essential pages for users of MediaWiki and our technical infrastructure. The most basic and required pages of the manual, how bugzilla works how to get developer access...
Maybe it's worth having both translatable categories separate? Maybe some languages make total sense for Promotion but less so for Support (no specific examples, although I can imagine Indic or Latin languages speakers needing those translations more for Promotion than Support, since the average sysadmin / developer of those languages is used to deal with English documentation).
It is clear that the deeper you get into both categories the clearer is the need to manage some English, at least in our current reality. We could probably define a VERY LIMITED set of pages translatable here and now in both categories and then consider the addition of new pages based on actual need.
And I agree with Nemo that those pages need a review in the canonical English version before making big calls for translation. But maybe this is a feature? It forces us to go through identified pages, mark them as translatable progressively and giving more time to translators to deal with new content. For instance, we could start focusing in How to contribute and Help:Formatting, and do a first test with these pages.
Yes, it's possible to "categorize" requests for translations, see for instance m:Special:AggregateGroups. It's also possible to define priority languages and even to disable translations in some languages, but this makes little sense on this wiki. In general, people will always translate what they're interested in, not what you'd most like to have translated, therefore if something would use translations it should be translatable, while for focused translation recruitement you can have a specific priority group of translatable pages.
In short, I don't like that "very limited" in all caps, unless you consider (like me) that e.g. 600 configuration settings pages (out of ten thousands content pages) would be a "very limited" set of translatable pages. ;-) Specific pages ready for translation should made translatable immediately: I'll comment on those two on talk.
Ok, got your point. I just find useful to have a set of pages identified for volunteer translators without own itch or agenda. "I want to start translating MediaWiki content to Catalan: where should I start? Thank you."
I've created a high priority group now.
