Upcoming feature – mockup of article suggestion on the Content Translation dashboard. Screenshot by Pau Giner, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
The month of June 2015 was a rather busy one for the Content Translation project. The tool was enabled in 148 more Wikipedias, including Konkani (gom) and Northern Luri (lrc)—the two newest Wikipedias. Earlier this month, it was activated on the largest Wikipedia, the English language, as well. Content Translation is now available on Wikipedias in all languages as a beta-feature for logged-in users. Besides its wider availability, several improvements were made including a new dashboard, notifications for users and additional features for link handling.
Content Translation is an article creation tool created by the WMF’s Language Engineering team that allows users to write a new Wikipedia article by translating it from an existing article on the same topic in another language. Development of the tool began in early 2014 and it has been available as a beta-feature for logged-in users since January 2015. Since then, over 2,500 translators have used Content Translation to create more than 10,000 new articles.
Highlights
An important improvement made to the Content Translation interface now allows editors to better handle links. Users can now view links missing in the translated article, add new links, and mark red links. This is particularly helpful when users choose to translate the text manually or are unable to use the link adaptation feature currently, like in right-to-left language wikis. Very soon, users will also be able to add external links. You can view a short animation to know more about the link feature.
A new addition is Echo-based notifications. Currently, users are notified of translation milestones, like their 1st, 10th and 100th translation. In the next few months more notifications will be added to allow better interaction through the tool. In addition, the Content Translation dashboard was updated by the volunteers Jarrett Munton, Michael Googley, and Kyle Wendland, all students of Southwest Baptist University in Missouri, USA, who worked with the team.
The past month was also one of the busiest for editors. Nearly 3,000 new articles were created using the tool, and more tore than 1300 new translators tried the tool. The Catalan Wikipedia now has more than 1,500 articles created with our translation tool; the Spanish and French Wikipedias have crossed the 1000 article rubicon. Key metrics are now better represented on the redesigned Special:ContentTranslationStats page, a page available on all Wikipedias.
Please see the Language team’s monthly report for more details.
Coming up
As the tool reaches more users, there has been a significant increase in the amount of feedback received. This has helped the development team identify special use cases and focus areas. In recent days, several bugs have been reported related to publishing failures; these are now being investigated and resolved.
For the upcoming three months, several feature enhancements and bug fixes are planned. An important feature addition will be the ability to create a task list—a list of articles to translate from within the user’s dashboard. Secondly, users will be shown suggestions about articles they could translate. This option is currently being evaluated by the Research team as part of a larger experiment.
Wikimania 2015
WMF Language Engineering team – Istanbul, May 2015. Photo by KartikMistry, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Earlier in June, the Language Engineering team hosted an online interaction session with Content Translation users, and we will also be at Wikimania next week. We will be presenting several talks and hosting two workshops specially for Content Translation:
- Revolutionizing article creation using Content Translation
- Designing Content Translation: how to improve the translation process from a user centered perspective
- Content_Translation-what’s running under the_hood
- Content Translation – translathon and discussion (workshop)
- Content Translation workshop for Central & South American Indigenous languages (workshop)
You can let us know your suggestions, complaints and other feedback on the project talk page. If you are attending Wikimania, please join us!
Runa BhattacharjeeLanguage EngineeringWikimedia Foundation
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