Huh, that's actually a very good idea, Philippe! The aggregate group system came about because we needed a way to group pages about the same thing, especially like in the case of the IEG (Individuel Editor Grants) pages where there were several interconnected pages and templates, and the templates needed to be translated in order for the pages to be fully translated. So to be able to give a single link to how to translate, aggregate groups were needed. However, one problem that I had with that was that pages could only be part of one aggregate group (I think that has changed now), so when I had a template that was used both for IEG and another set of pages, that had to be treated differently.

But yes, your idea of using categories instead, so that I would be able to give a link to Special:Translate?category=IEG_translatable_pages and have all pages in that category appear in the translate form, is a great one, and would be a very good replacement for the aggregate groups. Maybe you should write a Phabricator request for this feature, so the internationalization team can have a go at it at some point?

2017-04-14 2:10 GMT+02:00 Philippe Verdy <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr>:
I think the whole separate concept of "tranlation aggregate groups" is absolutely not needed (and was ill-designed since first time, without thinking about any form of scalability), this feature could just use the existing categories: just mark existing category pages as translatable, and it will create implicitly an aggregate group. Then translated pages in that category are automatically sorted within translated categories.

Note that categy pages ARE translatable too (see many examples in Meta or Commons or many other multilingual wikis outside Wikimedia).

No more "special page" for this feature. Special pages are just needed for marking pages for translations, and translated categories will be automatically created as well (their description may still use translation units), using language fallbacks by default for mising translated category names and category descriptions marked with <translate></translate> tags and submitted to the translation tool (by existing users with "translation admin" privilege).

No special navigation needed, and we can use the standard search tools for articles and categories. An addon on translated categories could provide aggregate statistics, just like we have singular statistics displayed at top of translated pages, and the "Translate" tab replacing the "Edit" tab on pages or categories already marked for translations.

We also can use the existing "category tree" extension, or just continue browsing categories with groups of 200 items, and with sort keys like we have today.

Like today with aggregate groups, aggregate statistics will still require some low-priority background job to refresh them regularly (singular statistics for one page only will be made first nearly synchronously) except that they will use translated pages collected in categories, to compute completion levels per page, and then for all pages listed in a given category and other stats combining pages in all its subcategories and descendants (taking care of avoiding double counts).

Ideally Work should be done to allow easier marking of pages for translations (with the VisualEditor), but this is a separate task. If this was completed, and the translation memory was smarter to detect translation units that are split, we could get rid of the "transaltion admin" privilege. The translation parser should also be able to split automatically lists of items (ordered numbered lists, unordered ulleted lists, definition lists) and automatically split tables by cell/header/caption. The "<translate>" markers should become invisible in the VisualEditor (replaced by hover events showing where translation units have been delimited such as showing a border and an icon in the border that allows enabling/disabling a translation unit, or split it by sentence. The VisualEditor should also be able to detect too long translation units (long paragraphs with multiple sentences) and suggest places to split them.

With such behavior, anyone could work on source pages. The task for translation admins would just be to check the number of fuzzy units or the deletion or complete replacement or of units by new ones. Paragraphs could be restructured, moved/split more easily without breaking existing translation units. But they would no longer need to have to manage aggregate groups with specific tools.




2017-04-14 0:42 GMT+02:00 Nick Wilson (Quiddity) <nwilson@wikimedia.org>:
Hi Haytham,
Just to be clear, I was not proposing disabling translation of those pages. I just propose removing them as aggregate groups, because they're historical pages (and need to be discouraged for translation anyway, a different task on another slow/massive page).
Is there anything specific about the AggregateGroups feature that you find useful, in relation to these historical pages?

Hi Philippe,
Yup, that's the ideal solution (and tracked in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T90511 ), but in the meantime, I was just wondering if there was any benefit to anyone, in leaving these historic pages as AggregateGroups, or, if it would just be happy cleanup work for me to remove them. :-)

Thanks both.

On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 2:21 PM, Haytham Aly <haytham.hammam@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Nick,

I would request keeping Grants:IEG, Grants:PEG, Grants:TPS, Program Capacity and Learning, and Research Labs2 for Arabic.

Regards,

Haytham Abulela Aly

Freelance Translator
Creative Translation
"Creative & Confident"


Certified member of the Society of Translators and Interpreters of British Columbia (STIBC) (EN>AR)
Arab Professional Translators' Society member (#10850)
Certified member at Egyptian Translators Association (EGYTA)
Registered at ProZ.com and LinkedIn.com
On 13/04/2017 1:19 PM, Nick Wilson (Quiddity) wrote:
Hi all,

Re: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:AggregateGroups
That page takes a long time to load on my old machine.
I'm wondering if I can/should just boldly disable(delete) some of the older groups?

Or, are these AggregateGroups still useful to you as translators, even though the content is {{historical}} ?

Specifically:
"Grants:IEG",
"GLAMing Madrid Challenge",
"Grants:PEG",
"Grants:TPS",
"Program Capacity and Learning",
"Research Labs2",
"Stewards elections 2015",
"Wikimedia Foundation elections 2013",
"Wikimedia Foundation elections 2015",
"Wikipedia 15".

That's all I can see that's obviously outdated.
Removing those few won't reduce the size of the Special page by much, but I suspect it is useful cleanup to do regardless. I just don't want to overlook a use-case!

Thanks for your input :)

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Community Liaison, WMF


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