-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2016-04-12 23:31 GMT+03:00 Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org:
On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 4:29 PM, Niklas Laxström niklas.laxstrom@gmail.com wrote:
2016-04-05 8:51 GMT+03:00 Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org:
Special:Translate doesn't work [1] and the current plan is to make it redirect to desktop which is disappointing and I'd guess loses us lots
of
potential editors (myself included).
When we developed the new interface for Special:Translate (aka TUX) we did some testing that it works on tablets. Is there way to mark it suitable for tablets alone because we have not designed it for smart phones?
It depends on what libraries it uses and whether those are mobile friendly. Best thing to do is create a Phabricator task and tag "reading web" and we can start exploring that. Definitely happy to help (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T102922#1466929).
Personally, I'd love the reading web team to collaborate with the languages team more - maybe that's something we can try to convince the powers that be to set aside time for as a future quarterly goal.
And what can we do for the rest? Let them too access TUX acknowledging it will be heavy and clunky? Would it make sense to generate minimal non-JavaScript version for all the rest using which they can get the job done if they are desperate but without all the advanced features of the regular TUX UI?
Or in short, I am wondering whether "mobile support" is all or nothing, or whether there is some middle way where we can have some quick wins if the alternative is to have no support at all?
All good questions and I'm not sure of the answer. Amir did a super interesting hack using Whatsapp and translate wiki at the hackathon in Jerusalem. If porting the existing translate interface to mobile proves too cumbersome we might want to explore and test some small lightweight translating tools.
Telegram, actually, but yeah, thanks a lot for the shout-out :) The code is at https://github.com/amire80/mediawiki-telegram-bot/ ; it was good enough for hackathon demo, but too buggy and insecure to run as a production service, although I plan to make it live Some Time Soon.
The main thing that made building this hack easy is the fine-grained division of the text to small translatable chunks—precisely the thing that the otherwise rightly dreaded <translate> tag provides. Making this chunking more automatic would be one possible strategy, but major development effort will be required for this.
Translation on mobile devices is desperately needed for a whole lot of reasons, and I hope we will be in a completely different situation with regards to this in a couple of years. Four years ago one could barely edit Wikipedia on mobile, and look where we are now, so I'm optimistic.