Content translation/Community Consultation June 2016/Announcement draft

Content Translation is an article creation tool that has been in use since January 2015. Content translation helps users translate existing articles from one Wikipedia into languages on other Wikipedias where the article does not exist. It is used by editors to write many new articles, increasing participation by new users and also renewing active editing in many Wikipedias. Translated from existing articles, 88000 new articles with considerably rich content have been written using this tool. Content Translation is an opt-in beta feature. We are now preparing to take Content Translation to a bigger group of users by taking the tool out of beta feature on a few Wikipedias. We prepared a preliminary list with the following wikis: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Hebrew, Indonesian, Japanese, Norwegian (Bokmal), Persian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Ukrainian. This set of wikis were selected to create variations in size, language groups, and usage patterns of Content Translation.

Based on an earlier consultation with the editors of the Catalan Wikipedia, the earliest adopter of this tool, the Content Translation team have prepared a preliminary set of requirements that we consider should be fulfilled before the tool is ready for use outside of beta. To focus on the features and concerns that are most important for users of Content Translation, we would like to get more feedback. We are hosting a consultation from June 8, 2016 to June 22, 2016 on this village pump.

As we work on the tool it is being improved every day, but we are particularly looking to better understand the issues in Content Translation that make the tool unusable or add extra workload for our editors. Please let us know on this topic thread. During the conversations, we may point you to Phabricator tickets for ongoing work, so that you can track the status of work. For new issues we will create new Phabricator tickets to help the development team keep the details documented. After June 22, 2016 we will go through all the feedback and follow up with a summary, and an updated plan for Content Translation’s move out of beta.

Thank you for your support for Content Translation. We look forward to hearing from you!

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