Topic on Talk:Wikipedia.org Portal Project

Hi, I very much hope that this is the correct venue for this question: I assume that you already discussed making the entire page translatable, not just the "The free encyclopedia" header. (For example, I think that it would be nice if readers from Germany could see "Wikipedia wird von der Wikimedia Foundation betrieben, einer gemeinnützigen Organisation, die auch eine Reihe anderer Projekte betreibt." instead of "Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that also hosts a range of other projects.") Where can I find out more about why you decided not to include this feature? Or is it instead possible to request this? Thanks!

I believe the biggest challenge is that the portal page currently has no concept of being logged in. Without that, we don't really know what language the user speaks.

Hi Kevin! If I'm not mistaken, the page currently extracts the preferred language from the browser settings. This is how the heading is displayed in different languages. For example, I am seeing "Wikipedia Die freie Enzyklopädie" at the top, instead of "Wikipedia The free encyclopedia".

Hi - thanks for the input on this issue. We've talked many times about localizing the whole portal page but haven't come up with a clear-cut way to do it that is fast loading and doesn't cause issues with slower internet connections.

However, I created a ticket that will start the process of getting the translations and if/when they start coming in via translatewiki, we can easily (hopefully!) merge them into our normal update process for the portal.

Cheers!

Hi Deb, thank you for creating a task on Phabricator. I'm wondering whether translating the entire page will really make the page much slower than just translating part of it. Can you maybe also show me the Phabricator task(s) dealing with this question? Thanks!

Hi @Gnom, your right, the translations currently happen via the browser settings.

I'll do my best to summarize why some people (maybe just me) had some hesitations about translating the entire page.

The portal page is a static HTML page, and the translations are done 'client-side' in the users browser with javascript, instead of serving the browser an already translated page. This means that first, the page loads in english, then the parts that need translating are hidden (currently just the globe), then we use javascript to pull the needed translations, update the page, and unhide the translated parts. We hide the translatable parts to avoid a "flash of unstyled content". This makes the page seem to load slower (here's the filmstrip view, note how the globe links load last).

My concern is that if we translate the rest of the page, we would have to hide all the elements on the page while the translation file loads, and then unhide them, and this might make the page look like it's loading slower. Some might think that hiding the elements while the translation file loads is unneccesary, but in this very early demo you can see how the globe looks if we don't hide the translatable parts, the translations are very sudden and jumpy.

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All that being said, translating the rest of the page in this fashion might still be better then having no translations at all. We already minimize the load time by saving the translations in the browser so that they are only loaded once, and there are a few more optimizations we can make to improve the loading experience.

This technical approach was discussed briefly on phabricator on this ticket, https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T121843

Hi Jan (wow, so many different people responding to my question!), Thank you for your comment. I very much understand that load time is a key issue. However, I was wondering whether we should try to translate the entire page since we have apparently already decided to translate a part of it - especially since a key element of that page is to showcase that Wikipedia is a multilingual project.

Hi, please allow me to ask again, since I am having a hard time trying to understand the various Phabricator tasks: Will there be translations of wikipedia.org? And is there anything I can help with? Thanks!

Hi @Gnom, thanks for asking!

We've got all the requests into translatewiki for the portal page text that needs to be translated. We've gotten quite a bit of translations already entered in but it seems like we are always needing more! The phabricator task description has the additional text we're looking for - so depending on your language knowledge, you might be able to help.

Here's a link to our project in translatewiki that you look at: https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special:Translate&group=wikimedia-portals&filter=translated&language=de&action=translate. If you are not used to this format, you'll need to click on the drop-down near the top of the right hand side of the page to 'translate into {your language}' to see what is left to do. The link I used above is to view the translations for the portal that are needed/completed in German.

Thanks again for helping with the translations! We hope to get what we've collected into production (on the Wikipedia.org portal page) soon!

Please add new set of messages into this group in TWN for further translation:

1. Wikipedia apps are now available:
2. Download for $os on the $store
3. View full [[$list|list of available Wikipedia apps]]

(or similar code)

Hi @Kaganer - the app links are still being evaluated in a long term test; once the test is done and all is good, we'll add in a request for that text to be translated.

We do have a new request in at translatewiki to get the licensing information translated: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T153764.