On Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 10:04 PM, Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net> wrote:
It's good to see an email appeal sent to editors
to translate articles,
although a direct email appeal to generally add information to the relevant
Wikipedia might be better (we don't just want translators, we also want new
content!).
I'm just talking here as someone that volunteered in a first test of this
feature. In that case I was asked whether I had edited Spanish Wikipedia
(which I had) and then got a few recommendations for articles that could be
translated from English to Spanish using the Content Translator. My edits
to es.wiki are quite thematic, and the recommendations I got were very
interesting to me, as an editor and as a reader.
I guess a problem with this mailing (among others) is that the threshold
should be more restrictive, for instances filtering out editors that never
added whole sentences or paragraphs of text, avoiding the occasional
editors of wrong data, images, etc, that might not know the language itself.
About why focusing on translations (or, to be more precise, Content
Translator), I think it is a campaign that makes sense. Most registered
editors don't know about Content Translator and/or wouldn't have a clear
idea of what articles to translate. In this sense, the email (that could be
a message in Talk pages indeed) is very useful, even for someone like me
who was well aware of Content Translator and had tried in some articles.
Of course, this shouldn't stop other types of recommendations to edit away.
--
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil