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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(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 4:29 PM, Niklas Laxström
<niklas.laxstrom(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2016-04-05 8:51 GMT+03:00 Jon Robson
<jrobson(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
> 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.