Hello, the latest issue of your favourite tech newsletter is ready for early translation at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2013/29
We're planning to send it on Sunday (in 2 days), but since there is already some stable content, we thought it would help translators if the page was set up for translation early.
The content will be frozen on Saturday evening (tomorrow), and it will be possible to continue or edit translations until Sunday evening. The translations that are complete or mostly complete will be posted on the wikis in that language.
Note: These two templates appear on the page and need to be translated separately (if translations aren't already done): * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Tech_header * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Tech_news_nav
This week we have also published a publication manual at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/Manual -- we hope it will help us maintain good quality formatting and error-free delivery of the newsletter to avoid unpleasant situations that have taken place in the past.
Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or concerns. I appreciate your help and feedback.
-- Tomasz
Hi again, this is just to let you know that Guillaume and I have worked on the newsletter a bit this afternoon and published its final version at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2013/29
Three new items have been added since my last e-mail: one about the planned roll-out of the VisualEditor to the English Wikipedia on Monday, one about the change of image scaler on Thursday and one about a new gallery design proposal by Brian Wollf -- from now on, there will be no more changes coming.
As usual, we will be sending out the newsletter to the subscribers in around 24 hours. Thanks in advance for your work and your involvement.
-- Tomasz
Ready for French. Note that the rmergency translation tou avertized last monday came too late. When I was notified, I started it immediatelyn but you had already taken a bogous snapshot of it, which was not corrected and contained obvious errors (that I have corrected even before I received the post sent by the bot on my French Wikipedia user page (the bot took an outdated translation taken several hours before). Really you have several problems: whe nwe subscribe for notifications by email, the Wikimedia email agent will take hours before sending the mail (much longer than what you expect: generally it is sent within the next 12 hours; if you send an emergency translation by using this bot, we won't receive the email immedaitely. Then it may take some hours before we actually read it (we are possibly sleeping, this was the case when I opened that email...), then we need a few hours to complete the translations and review it (performing additional checks aout the rendered page, the targets of links, and checking the terminology when the tech note describes a UI element of the interface, making sure it is coherent. A final read may further detect some monor typos. In summary, 24 hours is an ABSOLUTE minimum. NEVER fall below that limit. Some languages need other delays (French for example will target mostly users in Europe and Africa, even if there are Frennch users elsewhere in the world. counting the local time into account, and the fact that people are sleeping or moving to their work or coming back, or eating, they are not in front of their PCs to reply immediately to the requests. That's why these news shoud be prepared more progressively. I suggest that you include another page for further notifications that will be translated early, before you decide to include them in a newsletter. This way, we can still prepare the translations in a beta page. This page should contain everything that is beong worked or is planned provisionally for the next 4 weeks. Things could be prepared that will be stable, notably documentation pages that the tech notes will be linking to. The technical features themselves would be translated during their beta. You should always know in advance what you'll schedule for the next week, at least 7 days before. I think there's absolutely no need to publish something too early. Learn to be patient (of course some tech news cannot be planned sich as reporting incidents, in a very summary way, with a link to a page to follow it more completely). Every change in Wikimedia configuration or design should be planned, and tested with some betas. These beta periods are ideal to prepare accurate translations. It will be simpler to work on translations because they will be more accurate. In addition, you should monitor edits made on the English version you create, before taking a final snapshot for marking fuzzy things. Often we can detect typos or inaccaries. If you don't like these edits on the Englihs original, you an revert and discuss with the translator (you know who made the edits: make the source translations editable only by registered users that can be contacted in case of problems; these problems may be lack of understanding or lack or clarity pr precision in the source text).
(Note: I cannot mark these pages on Meta for making them ready for translations, or marking other existing transaltions as fuzzy or to confirm, using the translations adminsitrator tool, and we still lack a way to communiate with the one that proposed the source to translate; writing on the English talk page generally gives no response at all; remarks are ignored, and this is even more critical for these weekly translations that have a short schedule of a few hours only: the person that decides to press the GO button on the publication bot does not monitor the existing problems).
Philippe, thank you for your e-mail and apologies for such a belated reply.
Your message touches on a variety of subjects, so I'm going to answer them very briefly, hoping that other people might also want to get involved at some point. I'm afraid that you might have confused some things and mentioned subjects that are outside of our (mine or Guillaume's) control.
Firstly, we have never used any bots to notify translators about the issue being finished (and frozen); there are too many people subscribed to translation notifications on Meta, and Tech News isn't (yet) important enough to contact them all on their talk pages. Moreover, issue #29 was frozen on Saturday, and my last e-mail about it was sent that day; I don't know what notification you received on Monday but it certainly did not come from me or Guillaume.
Secondly, e-mail notifications are one of the things that lie outside of our control. I am aware that the Wikimedia mailing system can deliver some notifications late, but there shouldn't be any problems with this mailing list; I at least receive all messages almost immediately, even though I'm using a private e-mail provider. Can you clarify what you have in mind? Are these problems about e-mails coming from wiki@wikimedia.org or from this mailing list (translators-l@lists.wikimedia.org)?
Thirdly, we are aware of time zone differences and issues that stem from them; however, the 24 hours we give translators to translate the newsletter seem to be just enough, and most of the localized versions are ready long before we send them out. There are currently no plans to extend the translation period beyond those 24 hours; I don't want to fix something that ain't broken.
As far as your schedule suggestions are considered, I'm afraid that they are completely out of touch with the reality. It is absolutely impossible for us to prepare future issues four weeks in advance, as we report news that have already happened and some that are due to happen. Of the ten issues published so far, the only topics that were repeated are (1) MediaWiki updates every week and (2) Universal Language Selector roll-out; even the widely announced VisualEditor roll-out schedule got changed a couple of times. And for those messages that are repeated every week, you can use translation memory and import translations with one click of your mouse.
The suggestion to prepare the newsletter seven days in advance is also unrealistic; such outdated news would be of little or no value for the community. I am not sure how much you know about the way that configuration or software changes are submitted and deployed on Wikimedia wikis; perhaps you ought to have a look at Gerrit some time to see that is impractical (and sometimes useless) to test them all on a beta cluster somewhere and prepare 'documentation' for them.
Lastly, I am very sorry to hear that you think we (I) don't 'like edits to the English original'. We do appreciate all efforts and edits made to the page before it is frozen; edits that come after the issue is published we try to keep to a minimum as not to give our translators unnecessary work. I'm also afraid that your last paragraph is completely untrue; we monitor talk pages of all issues as well as the main talk page at [[m:Talk:Tech/News]] and respond to feedback as soon as possible.
In general, I think that you address your feedback to the wrong people; Tech News is a small initiative driven by two (2) volunteers; it is impossible for us to influence the way that the Wikimedia Foundation, volunteer extensions developers or other Gerrit users develop software and implement configuration changes.
Your suggestions would be good for a world in which every software changes are planned long in advance, are beta-tested for some time, get proper documentation in English and give time for users to translate them into their languages. With the current resources in software development and translation communities that we have, it is impossible to do and can only be considered wishful thinking, and I'm afraid it will not come into reality for a very long time (if ever).
Tomasz
2013/7/21 Tomasz W. Kozlowski tomasz@twkozlowski.net
Philippe, thank you for your e-mail and apologies for such a belated reply.
Your message touches on a variety of subjects, so I'm going to answer them very briefly, hoping that other people might also want to get involved at some point. I'm afraid that you might have confused some things and mentioned subjects that are outside of our (mine or Guillaume's) control.
Firstly, we have never used any bots to notify translators about the issue being finished (and frozen); there are too many people subscribed to translation notifications on Meta, and Tech News isn't (yet) important enough to contact them all on their talk pages. Moreover, issue #29 was frozen on Saturday, and my last e-mail about it was sent that day; I don't know what notification you received on Monday but it certainly did not come from me or Guillaume.
Secondly, e-mail notifications are one of the things that lie outside of our control. I am aware that the Wikimedia mailing system can deliver some notifications late, but there shouldn't be any problems with this mailing list; I at least receive all messages almost immediately, even though I'm using a private e-mail provider. Can you clarify what you have in mind? Are these problems about e-mails coming from wiki@wikimedia.org or from this mailing list (<translators-l@lists.**wikimedia.orgtranslators-l@lists.wikimedia.org
)?
I am speaking about all emails that come from wikimedia.org (this includes notifications received from edits made to pages I'm following or to my talk page, they are NEVER sent immediately but are scheduled and will be sent after a few hours).
I have aboslutely no problem of delays for any emails sent to my email addresses, even this one which is sent to my old account on @wanadoo.fr and redirected immediately to Gmail, without more delays than a few seconds.
So yes the problem is with emails supposed to be sent by wikimedia (notifications notably). Note that the true mailing lists have no such delay (e.g. <translators-l@lists.**wikimedia.orgtranslators-l@lists.wikimedia.org>, according to the tracking headers, note however that even this list has some internal delays: you may have submitted sometime to the wikimedia system, but nothing will get out before some time, and I suspect that the bot does not send them at the same time for all wiki projects, e.g. those like me that subscribed using their main wiki account on FR.WP will be sent the mails long after those that subscribed whose main account is on EN.WP or Commons; that may explain why I NEVER see any email from this list immediately like you but it is really sent by Wikimedia several hours later it was composed and submitted; I've seen alerts composed on Friday evening being sent only on Sunday at late evening; the delay was NOT within the email delivery on Internet but ONLY within Wikimedia servers).
Mails sent by the translation project bot are in fact forwarded to us using the notification system. There are so many emails going out from Wikimedia caused by individal edits and sent to just one person, that they are always scheduled. You cannot expect these notifications to be sent immediately.
For this reason, emails sent to lists for projects should use another way: they are not individualized, their content is identical. I would suggest using another less crowded mailing system for faster delivery of these emails that have a short lifetime, for actions to be done in just the next few hours.
Is there another mail server you could use and to which we could subscribe instead of the existing (very slow) one ? I could as well acept emails coming directly from the personal email of the person writing these notification messages to the translators, but may be an external mailing list manager would be preferable (e.g. Google Plus, Yahoo, Bing, with a specific "group" page...), because these services have much larger capacities. But it could be as well a mail server hosted on Wikimedia Labs for this small project, but that could be used as well for any other need for urgent notifications to small groups of Wikimedia users in specific projects (including for communicating between wiki admins, or developers, or with beta testers for experimental features), that need urgent action (to be done within hours or in a week maximum).
Most notifications sent to Wikimedia suers do not need any emergency emails, users are notified for changes in pages whose reading and correction have no limit of time, so it does not matter if these emails take 2 or 4 days to be delivered, possibly grouped within the same message for several notifications related to the same user account, or for "campaigns" like fund raising or most votes, or most translations projects (e.g. Wikipedia portal pages, extended MediaWiki documentation), or quality pages and projects of evaluation of content quality, and most requests for comments (for things to be decided and not implemented, including design ideas).
Some notifications require fast delivery (this includes legal emergencies, for mails sent in fact directly to wiki admins, such as legal deletion requests after a copyright violation or a subpoena is received, or in case of massive abuses by hostile users/bots, for example requests to block some rnages of IP addresses or to secure a server under attack, including DoS attacks). And may be it will be useful to have alternate ways to communicate that do not depend only on Wikimedia internal servers and resources (that's why I was suggesting large scale services like Google or Yahoo, using closed "group" pages; but please avoid the Facebook dustbin !).
translators-l@lists.wikimedia.org