În data de 14 aprilie 2012, 01:59, Siebrand Mazeland
<s.mazeland(a)xs4all.nl> a scris:
Op 14 apr. 2012 om 00:01 heeft Strainu
<strainu10(a)gmail.com> het volgende geschreven:
Re-adding the list, as this is of public
interest.
Wow. It's generally considered to be pretty rude to just publish a private reply to a
public list. I'm assuming good faith, but please ask next time, would you?
Actually, you shouldn't AGF. I was aware that this is considered rude,
but I did it anyway. There was no reason for that email to be private.
If I am to be the bad guy for something to change, so be it. I will
live with that.
În data de 13
aprilie 2012, 19:42, Niklas Laxström
<niklas.laxstrom(a)gmail.com> a scris:
I do consider users (at least one, me!).
Glad to hear that, but you're not the main user of either
translatewiki or mediawiki in general.
What's the relevance here, or do you feel like Niklas needs an old fashioned and
proper bashing?
I feel Niklas needs to be less ego-centric. I was talking about "the
main users of the software" and he responded that he thinks about
himself. Or was that also a hyperbole?
This also applies to many others from the development team, as a
search in the wikitech-l archives will show.
Hyperbole is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical
device or figure of speech.
That's one hell of an exaggeration, but be it your way.
Like I mentioned in the email, I proposed that we notify affected
Wikpedias *before* the changes are deployed [1] and executed that
together with Gerard. They were given right to veto any change they
didn't like or wanted to discuss. And some of them did use that
possibility.
Search for "translation" on the Romanian village pump:
https://ro.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AC%C4%83utare&profi…
The ro.wp embassy:
https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discu%C8%9Bie_Wikipedia:Ambasad%C4%83
I can see no such notification. No message from you, and only one from
Gerard, when the translation team was founded. If you chose only some
Wikipedias, then let me tell you this is even worse than no
notification at all. The thing is - the wiki environment is by
definition decentralized and hard to follow for small communities. If
you choose to notify only big wikis or the wikis that already receive
support from the WMF (e.g. Arabic, Indic languages), you're basically
having no effect at all.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/107309 is not about Romanian, so
there's no reason for such a message at this point in time. Also see
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-February/058189.html.
True. My apologies here. But still, so far I haven't seen a single
message from the i18n team.
As to solutions, I have proposed at Wikimania
2010 to the person that
was coordinating the Translation hub from meta to put up some
automated notification system when a new translation request appears.
This hasn't happened and translations in most languages are still
happening by chance, as different users go by the translation hub.
It's being worked on. Expect something soon.
Worked on? I know first hand that such a notification system does not
take more than a man-day to crate with a minimal set of features.
Add-ons can be added iteratively later.
So "something soon" is "much too late" from my POV. You don't need
to
have it deliver french fries to the communities from the first
version. :)
I suggest you do the same, at least for
Special:AdvanceTranslation
strings. Some time before a scheduled deployment (ideally, 7 days, but
at least 72 hours), notify _all_ the village pumps and some users
(either all the users that translated the advanced strings, or all the
users that sign-up on some dedicated page) of the deployment. This
way, you don't have to wait for the consensus, but you're giving
communities an opportunity to reach it.
Nah. These changes are usually do rare that we'll just approach communities as we go
along. It seems that MediaWiki core namespace changes are now the most heavily QA-ed and
agreed upon changes in all of MediaWiki.
Have you considered malicious, subtle changes (e.g. change of a
diacritic just minutes before the deployment)? Are there checks in
pace to prevent them? Having the community aware ahead of time would
increase the number of interested eyes.
Another way to go is to have regular deployments
as a rule. Right now,
you guys are something like "oh, we'll do it about every 3-4 months,
if the review queue is not too big and if something goes wrong we'll
push it for 2 more weeks". Having the deployment schedule a year in
advance, including the features you're targeting on each deployment,
and enforcing a maximum delay of 1 week used only for deployment bugs
and nothing else would greatly enhance predictability and give
translators a target to aim for.
You are making many assumptions here. Not sure about the scope -- "you guys" is
pretty generic--, but I'm pretty certain that there are a few variables
(understatement) you failed to take into account that prove this theory as implausible.
"You guys" means MediaWiki developers, both paid and volunteers.
I'm talking about a time-based release train here. I would say that
MediaWiki already uses this system, but it's just very, very slack. Of
course there are many variables that need to be taken into account,
but my understanding is there is somebody responsible for the
deployments. This person should handle those variables so *something*
(which is as close as possible to the original plan) is deployed as
close as possible to the announced moment.
Strainu