ContentTranslation gets to 2000 - Wikimedia-l

30 Apr 2015

[ cross-posted to MediaWiki-i18n, Wikimedia-L and Wikitech-L ]

Dear Wikimedians,

The 2000th article that was written using the ContentTranslation extension
was published today.

Article #2000 was translated from English to Greek, and it's about Škocjan
Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Slovenia.

Original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0kocjan_Caves
Translated:
https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%A3%CF%80%CE%AE%CE%BB%CE%B1%CE%B9%CE%B1_%C…

In case you're wondering what ContentTranslation is, here's a brief
summary: ContentTranslation is an extension that helps Wikipedia editors to
create articles quickly and easily by translating them from other
languages. It's being developed by the Language Engineering team. Its
design started in the summer of 2013 and its coding started in early 2014.
You can find more info at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/CX as well as in
the following blog posts:
* http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/01/10/content-translation-beta-coming-soon/
* http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/01/20/try-content-translation/
*
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/04/06/content-translation-improved-my-edits/
* http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/04/08/the-new-content-translation-tool/

Some more data about ContentTranslation:
* Our first deployment was in mid-January to Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese,
Esperanto, Norwegian Bokmal, Danish, Indonesian and Malay. Now we support
43 languages, and this number is growing every week as we extend the
deployment (a special thank-you to the Ops and Release Engineering people,
who continuously and tirelessly support our deployment effort).
* In all the Wikipedias in which ContentTranslation is deployed, it is
currently defined as a Beta feature, which means that it is only available
to logged-in users who opted into it in the preferences.
* The 1000th article was written on April 10th, so it took much less to get
to 2000 than to 1000.
* The language into which the most articles were translated is Catalan:
762. The Catalan Wikipedia community always had a strong inclination to
translation, it was the first one that volunteered to test the tool in labs
in the summer of 2014 and provided a lot of useful feedback, and it also
has good machine translation support thanks to the Freely-licensed Apertium
engine.
* The second most popular target language is Spanish. It started slowly in
the first couple of months, but it's quickly growing since March.
* Other target languages that are quickly growing lately are French,
Portuguese and Ukrainian.
* The language from which the largest number of articles is translated is
English. It is followed by Spanish, from which a lot of articles are
translated to the closely related Portuguese and Catalan.
* The total number of people who published at least one translated article
into any language is 663.
* Of more than 2000 articles that were created, about 60 were deleted, so
we have a reason to think that the quality of the created articles is
pretty OK.
* In Catalan we see that ContentTranslation has some influence on the
number of articles created per day - it was usually between 60 and 90
before 2015, and in January and February it was over a 100. It's too early
to say how does it influence other languages, but we are optimistic ;)
* A community discussion about enabling the tool in the French Wikipedia
ended with 50 "votes" in support of the tool and 0 "votes" against it
;)

Some of our plans for the coming months are:
* Enabling more languages, including big ones like English, Russian and
Italian, as well as right-to-left languages.
* Improving the support for links.
* Creating support for smart suggestions of articles to translate, as well
as "task lists" for translation projects.
* Starting to get the tool out of beta status :)

I'd like to thank all the Wikimedia volunteers around the planet who are
participating in this effort by translating articles, translating the
extension's user interface, testing the tool, assisting other wikipedians
to translate, organizing translation workshops, reporting useful bugs,
submitting patches, and generally proving day after day what an incredible
community they are - hard-working, massively-multilingual, helpful,
patient, creative and talented.

Thank you - we have a lot more to achieve together \o/

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬