Commons talk:Help page maintenance

"Importance" of languages

Translation is essential for English, German, Spanish, Portugese, Italian, Chinese and Japanese. People who speak other language have probably been forced to learn some basics second language skills for at least one of the above mentioned. langages. Most contries in Europe have education in both a second and third language. / Fred Chess 09:25, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Well I don't want to enforce certain languages (although I personally see no point supporting for example Alemannisch, as it is a German dialect and there are so many German dialects...). But the basic rules with required maintainance updates will lead to a point at which only important languages (languages that have enough supporters) will remain. Which languages is up to everybody. That way I can avoid senseless cultural-dominance-debates with people like Teofilo (I can always say to them: "Well if the language is important you have the possibility updating the pages. If you don't do that this language is not important for you and your ranting is pointless." ;-) and we are more flexible at the same time. Arnomane 09:45, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

By the way: Don't let french people read your comment. They will miss the "language of diplomacy"... And apart that old times glorification it is still an important major language spoken in many nations as official language. Arnomane 09:53, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

LOL, I forgot French! ;-)

I apologize to all French speakers. / Fred Chess 10:10, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, basically my point is that unless there is full support for these languages, Commons is not multilingual. Support of minor languages is nice but not so important. / Fred Chess 10:38, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

I very dislike the idea of hiding non up-to-date translations. There won't be much left after a time. Often even the english version is outdated. Improvement of information propagation within the Commons is needed. And translators should be enforced to think about their translation. Don't translate every little thing, where outdating is predictable. Then the main problem is the chaotic structure of the Commons. Nobody is enforcing structure. Policies are changing permanent. Commons is a very inimical environment for translations. Persisting structure should be enforced, then translating wouldn't be such a fruitless job, not outdating that quickly. The problem isn't lazy translators or translators not loving their languages enough, it is structurelessness and ever-shifting policies. --::Slomox:: >< 16:43, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Well if the english page is outdated there is not much to do otherwise than improving the english page first. So in these cases it makes no sense hiding not up to date translations. So hiding will only be done at well established pages. Well I am doing this enforcement for quite some time now. And this is some sort of enforcing too. Guess how many of the pages I have completly rewritten (and translated into German) did I without much help? Almost all. And I am currently reorganizing the chaotic structure of Commons. That's why also this page exists. So these hiding things will only take place in well organized places in order not to completly forget these pages. And believe me an outdated translation equally presented along side a good up to date original is the worst thing. It is even more worse that no page in that language. So if there are only 15 good translations of the Main page left after a while this is an improvement. It is up to everybody joining in and to decide if his language is one of the best supported. And maybe later we can also increase the time frame until something is hidden but let us see what will happen with the procedure of now. A little bit pressure does help here. And up to now I did not even set links into italic as I don't wanted to be too fast and thus might be considered hostile - I just said that I will do it. ;-) Arnomane 18:43, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

But Arnomane, are you personally going to be checking whether all the translations have been updated lately too? Is there some way this is automatic? I don't understand...! pfctdayelise (translate?) 22:34, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

At first this all applies only to articles that are well done and up to date in English. This is only a handful of articles currently. Hiding outdated translations of outdated originals wouldn't make any sense at all. It is also all hand made. I don't want automatisms as this would lead to failures and frustration and pointless policy debates. Basically someone beeing able reading and writing that language says with his sign at the relevant article section: "This article is up to date or not up to date." I simply trust that people don't fake. However if there is a language nobody of the involved people is able to speak you look at the edit dates. If there was a larger edit at the English version and this change did not cause an update change in a translation I can't read within the given period (currently two weeks) I can assume safely that this translation is outdated (I don't talk of minor edits; what a minor edit is depends from the situation and is biased to the person making his sign). I personally want to avoid this second fall back decission system but at the beginnings it will probably used quite often until more native speakers join. And of course after many translations are firstly declared outdated and have walked through the "outdated-procedure" I won't look for myself into that articles anylonger. People wanting that translation back at the front side have to take action by themselves. So after a while the review work will decrease to the languages that get supported by different people. I also think that we will increase later the both intervalls from two weeks each to one month each but at the beginnings I don't want to wait two months as there is a large delay with outdated versions and there is some visible change necessary in order to alert people that their language needs some care now (and not in two months what will be the case otherwise; two weeks warning with a non-offensive italic writing should be friendly and yet clearly visible). For sure all this depends from two things: At first the English originals need to be cleaned up and more people need to join and to help within that project. Arnomane 00:13, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

P.S: Practically spoken which articles are currently affected by the hiding? At the moment only Main Page, Commons:Welcome, Commons:Community Portal, perhapes Commons:Licensing (see merge comment), Commons:Contact us, Commons:General disclaimer, Commons:Privacy policy, Commons:Village pump, Commons:Help desk, Commons:Community news and perhapes 3 or 4 more I forgot at the moment that they are really up to date (or were updated by me). There are several up to date articles as well I did not list at the moment and that are only in English currently (like Commons:Tool integration). Within the next days Commons:First steps, Commons:FAQ and some newly merged articles (I need to look there first) will have good written English versions too. All this is progressing so slowly as so many articles were once created as bad stubs and thus are practically non existant and need to be rewritten from scratch (as I do at the moment with the very important Commons:First steps). Arnomane 00:33, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Anyways I have droped now the hiding thing and have recommended the current scheme of Main page which also makes less work. ;-) Arnomane 11:01, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

Messages for user talk pages

Not sure where to fit it in here but I feel it is quite important to have the user warnings translated. {{Image source}} and {{Idw}}, I guess. Anything else on COM:TM? Maybe {{Welcome}}. If a user's image is going to be deleted it would be nice if they could find out in their own language. pfctdayelise (translate?) 12:52, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

I think {{Welcome}} fits best into Commons:Help page maintenance/Central community pages. The other templates that are related to a topic like deletion of images should be kept along side the page they are related to (like Commons:Deletion requests) IMHO. Arnomane 10:08, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

The thing is, for some users who spend all their time at a local project and just quickly come here to upload an image, the user talk page warnings might be nearly the first messages they see (after the main page I guess). Because they're deletion warnings I really feel they're more important to have translations in. pfctdayelise (translate?) 01:43, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Commons:Categories

I just rewrote Commons:Categories - it would be good if someone would have a look. If this becomes stable, I can also do the german version. Uh, what's the procedure for letting people know that a page has changed and translations need to be updated? There's only english and german for this page, but there are others... -- Duesentrieb^(?!) 00:30, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

There are the maintenance sub pages, where there is a central short summary for every listed page and so forth. There it is also listed if a page needs to be rewritten/retranslated and so on... I have added Commons:Categories at Commons:Help_page_maintenance/Further_key_help_pages#Commons:Categories and given a short summary what needs to be done. (I didn't add all existing pages up to now as many pages are still redundant and what to merge how is often changing while I write and I wasn't sure if Commons:Categories is a good lemma, see my comments at the tasks...). Feel free to change the tasks there. ;-) Arnomane 09:58, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

May Translation Month

To give this big push something of a goal to work towards, why don't we aim to have all the pages listed here fully translated* by the end of May?

Of course, we will fail, but you have to aim high to make good results. :)

* Fully translated: m:Translation lists 22 languages that have WPs with over 10,000 articles. They would be a good start! The languages are: Български Català Čeština Dansk Deutsch English Español Esperanto (hm...) Eesti Français Italiano Nederlands 日本語 Occitan Polski Portuguese Română Русский Svenska Српски Українська_мова 中文

That meta page also lists translators for those various languages. I think we should work much more closely with meta since they are already set up for mass translating.

But first (April), I think we should make sure the help pages are all accurate and fairly complete and stable. Then, spamspamspamadvertisespam all the wikipedias etc to get some help translating.

What do you think? pfctdayelise (translate?) 12:27, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

The translation month May is a good thing and I think it is manageable. Currently we are almost done with the help pages in English. Now the maintenance and policy pages need to follow. For example I am currently changing the deletion policy pages and deletion procedures in order to make it easier for all of us using it. Arnomane 10:39, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

From: --Jannnichick (talk) 01:55, 9 March 2013 (UTC)--> Yes, that's a good idea. However, I noticed that Wiki doesn't have Filipino translations or Tagalog from English yet. I would love to help.

Upload page

(continuing conversation from User talk:Arnomane#Re-organisation glitch about putting Template:Information on the Upload page) Point taken about the probs with extra pages! The only suggestion I can offer is that the old Commons:Upload summary had the Template:Information in a box on the right hand side. Perhaps this would be OK on the Upload page too. Anyway, more congrats for all this work: I'm sure there will be lots of wrinkles to iron out... JackyR 00:09, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Description pages

Question: Is there a program / coordination / rules for description pages translations? I have done most english to french translation of FP (something like 900 translations, most of them short, of course, but there are exceptions), with some cases of French to english Translations. As stated above French is "language of diplomacy" (LOL). It also is the 3rd wikipedia language... and pictures without understandable descriptions are often useless (example). I can extend my translations from FP to QI (I probably will start soon) but in no way can I translate all the captions in French, not mentionning the other 20 "important langages"...Berru 16:58, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Tracking policy translation

Please see COM:VPR#Tracking_policy_translation. Rd232 (talk) 14:52, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

How about translations using translate wiki ?

By now Wikimedia Commons is old enough project that we can consider help pages are by now stable enough.Is it not possible to share multilingual translation responsibilities to translate wiki .For smaller wilies it becomes defficult to put translation volunteers at multiple places like translate wiki, commons, meta, strategy wiki etc. so if all the translation responisbilities go to translate wiki, is it possible ? Mahitgar (talk) 04:45, 26 October 2011 (UTC)