User talk:CreativeC

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-- Welcoming Bot 15:30, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Your restructuring of I:RFD (and a number of other pages)

CreativeC, I truly don't understand why you would undertake to start marking the page for translation, and then move requests off onto a subpage, without discussing it somewhere first. (Talk page. Community portal. Admins' noticeboard. Somewhere.) It's not that the idea is a terrible one, by any means. But I can't say we've remotely had anyone complain that they couldn't use the page.

And while the translate extension is, in principle, the appropriate way to handle multilingual pages these days, neither of the two translations that currently exist has been touched in over five years. So it's just not clear this is even necessary. (In at least one earlier case when you tried to change the translation schema, you were reverted because the page didn't work right any more.

And finally, you do not have translationadmin rights here. So if you're going to go do all this, you still need to ask someone to formally run the translation markup. So why would you do this without discussing first?

I'm inclined to completely revert this one as unnecessary, but I'll give you a chance to answer first. StevenJ81 (talk) 15:46, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

@StevenJ81: Sorry, for that action, I took bad habits on Wikispecies (as I was the first translation administrator I had absolute free hands).

As for the earlier case, this is weird as it worked in the preview, and the <languages/> tag also works on pages of the same namespace like ISO 639 or Wikis.

And I really think that marking such "debate pages" for translations is useful as some users aren't confident with English. Once my temporary ban will expire I'll open a discussion on the Community Portal to define which pages to translate and how (e.g structure of pages with discussion section) and ask for translation adminship to apply community's decision.

CreativeC (talk) 18:29, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

• If you give me your word that you won't mark up any more (new) pages, I'll lift the block. I simply wanted to make sure we had spoken before you went running off to mark more pages.
• In principle, I'm fine with your improving the markups on pages that already use this extension. But please think three times before doing so. If you substantially reorganize the markup, then you leave all the existing translations as outdated and inconsistent with the base English page, at least until people start translating them anew. So your changes might be objectively better. But unless they really improve things a lot, it may be better (in the real world) to leave a less-perfect (but intact) markup in place than it is to have a near-perfect (but inconsistently complete) markup in place.

  To some extent, this may depend on how carefully the community actually keeps up the translations. I don't really know the answer to that, but I think it's quite possible that many of the translations already in place have not been maintained, as projects using those languages are no longer housed on Incubator. When I mark a page for translation, I always go fix the English-variant, French and Hebrew translations. But how well others are kept up I just don't know. PLEASE try to check that before starting a community discussion.

• Please also remember that there is an important difference between the multilingualism of this wiki and that of, say, Meta and Wikispecies. For the most part, to the extent that those wikis are operating as multilingual communities, it is because large numbers of L1, or at least fluent, speakers of fairly widely-spoken languages are doing everyday work on those wikis in those languages. Here, you have several hundred microcommunities, much of whose everyday work is in languages that are not widely spoken. But when their contributors come to central pages ("debate pages" or otherwise), they have to use some other language, because most people do not speak the languages of their test projects. it would be completely impossible for us to manage in each of those languages, because nobody would understand anyone else. De facto, we have to use a lingua franca here. Now, occasionally people will write in a handful of other, widely spoken languages on the pages (French, Spanish and Chinese probably being most common), and that's fine. We'd never say you can't. But we really need to be able to interact with everyone, and on the whole, English is far and away the best vehicle for that. Consider, in that context, these points:

  We have nine (full) administrators here. See Incubator:Administrators/List by languages spoken. All of them speak English at level 3 or higher. There is no other language that more than two of us speak at level 3 or higher. (And any language that is not spoken by at least one administrator at level 3 or higher is going to be very problematic on a central page.)

  Suppose that your language situation wasn't fr-N, en-4, de-1. Instead, let's say it was oc-N, fr-3.5, en-2.5, de-1. Still, you understand that most of us don't speak Occitan, so you'd prefer to use French instead of English because even though your English is OK, you're "not as comfortable". By the rules, you absolutely have the right to do that. In practice, unless someone is willing to run your posting through Google translate—which is far from perfect—it means you have to wait for one of the two of us who speak French to respond. In reality, your en-2.5 will still be more effective on Incubator than your fr-3.5 would be. (Not the best example, as we can generally manage French. But I think you see my point.)

Remind me: What page was that <translate/> problem on? I have a hunch why it didn't work, but I want to check things out.

StevenJ81 (talk) 20:50, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

@StevenJ81: You have my word. I already experimented the consequences of updating the markup on Wikispecies, and all those outdated pages (they're not really active about translations) and now I understand the problem of translating central discussion pages.

As for the <translate/> it also was on I:RFD. Now I figured out that I applied <translate/> on a page not marked for translation. CreativeC (talk) 06:25, 26 May 2018 (UTC)