2017-04-27 8:55 GMT+03:00 Strainu strainu10@gmail.com:
Following the recent outage, we've had a new series of complaints about the lack of improvements in CX, especially related to server-side activities like saving/publishing pages.
Now, I know the team is involved in a long-term effort to merge the editor with the VE, but is there an end in sight for that effort? Can I tell people who ask "look, 6 more months then we'll have a much better translation tool"?
Is there a publicly available roadmap for this project and more generally, for CX?
Hi,
Thanks again for bringing this up.
Currently the Language team is indeed working on transitioning the editing component to VE. At the moment we are completing the rewrite of the frontend internals using OOjs UI and so using VE's special handling of edge cases. This is more than a refactoring—this will also improve the stability of several features such as saving and loading, paragraph alignment, and table handling.
We hope to complete the transition of the translation editing interface to VE in July–September 2017. This will not only change the interface itself, but will also bring in some of the most often requested CX features, such as the ability to add new categories, templates, and references using VE's existing tools rather than just adapt them, and to edit the translation using wiki syntax.
The next part to develop would be another round of improvement of template support. The previous iteration was done in the latter half of 2016, and allowed adapting a much wider array of templates, including infoboxes. However, one important kind of template that is not yet supported well enough is ones inside references (a.k.a. citations or footnotes), and this will be the focus of the next iteration. We also plan to improve CX’s template editor itself by allowing machine translation of template parameter values, and by fixing several outstanding bugs in it.
After finishing these two major projects, in early 2018 we expect to work on fixing various remaining bugs, after which we plan to start declaring Content Translation as non-beta in some languages. We are figuring out which bugs exactly will these be; the current list is at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/2030/ , but it will likely change somewhat before we get there. (Suggestions about what should go there are welcome at any time.)
Finally, two further future directions that we are thinking about longer-term are: 1. Translation List: Shared and personal lists of articles awaiting translation ( https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T96147 ). We already have designs for it, but the implementation will have to wait until we fix the more urgent issues above. 2. Better support on mobile devices. This is complicated, but much-needed. Some early thoughts about this can be found at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation/Product_Definition/Mobile... , but there will need to be much more design and development around this.
You can see a more formal document about this here, although the content is largely the same: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation/Roadmap/2017%E2%80%932018
The Language team already had this more or less figured out a couple of months ago, but the publishing was delayed because of the higher-level planning process ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2017-2018/D... ).