Help:Content translation/Publishing

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Publishing completes the translation process. When you publish a translation, a new page is created with the contents you translated. The result is a regular wiki page that is visible to the community of editors, and it will evolve independently with further contributions from you and other editors.

Publishing is an important decision point. You are creating an initial version of the page that will be reviewed by the community of editors. If you are not sure that the initial content meets the standard for quality for the wiki, you may consider adjusting the publication options before publishing. Among the publish destinations you'll find options to publish your translation as a draft page where other editors can help you improve the content.

If the page you are translating already exists, you need to be careful with the existing content. By default, publishing will override existing contents of the page (asking for confirmation first), but you may want to check the existing content first and do some work to keep valuable contributions users made to it.

More details about the options available and considerations about the published content are provided next.

Publishing options

Publish settings dialog showing destination options.

Next to the "Publish" button you can find a settings option to control how publishing is done.

Publish destinations

Wiki content is organized in different namespaces where pages and sub-pages live depending on their purpose. While a Wikipedia article lives in the main namespace and is subject to Wikipedia quality standards, it is ok for users to include personal information such as the name of their pet in their user pages under the user namespace.

Content translation publishes content to the main namespace by default, but other options are available through the publish settings menu:

New page. Contents will be published as a new page in the main namespace. If the page already exists, contents of the existing page will be overwritten (more on this below). Content that does not meet the quality standards for the wiki will be reverted by other editors. So make it sure that your translation is well written, reads naturally in the target language and includes references for users to verify the origin of the claims in the content.
Personal draft. A page will be published under your user namespace. While it is still visible for everyone, it is published in a place where you are free to create unfinished content. In this way you can iterate to improve the content without rush or ask for help. Once you are happy with your draft, you can transfer these contents by copying them to a new or existing page. The user namespace is also useful as an intermediary page where publish a translation that you want to manually combine with the contents of an existing article (more on this below).
Community draft. On wikis where the draft namespace is available, you can publish your translation there. Pages published in the draft namespaces are considered as proposals for page creation that need further work before being moved to the main namespace. While the user namespace is a generic space for all kinds of user content, the draft namespace is specially created for this kind of drafts.

You can also select the desired namespace by including it as a prefix in the title of the translation. This allows to select additional namespaces to those provided as options in the previous menu, but it also may be prone to typos.

Considerations on content quality

Publishing a translation is subject to the same quality standards as creating a new page on the wiki from scratch. Content translation makes it easy to reuse the effort for another community and create a much more elaborate first version of your page, but you are ultimate responsible to review the translation contents, improve them and decide when it is ready to publish. Some considerations:

Pay attention to the warnings. Content translation surfaces different warnings during the translation process to surface possible problems. Please consider these messages carefully to improve your content before publishing it, to make sure it is not deleted by the community. Pay special attention to review the initial automatic translation when available since low-quality translations are often deleted by reviewers.
Review the published result. After publishing your translation, it is recommended to read the resulting page to apply further improvements you may have missed before.

Published articles include an edit tag that allows the community to review them. The resulting article is also linked automatically with other versions in other languages through Wikibase to facilitate the navigation.

Working with existing articles

The main focus of Content translation is to create an initial version of a missing article. However it is possible to use the tool to either expand an existing article that may or may not have been started as a translation.

Overwrite existing content

When trying to publish an article that already exists, the user will be asked for confirmation. You need to be very careful when replacing existing content. This is only recommended when you are sure that the translated version is much superior to the existing article and no valuable contribution will be lost by replacing the content. For example, if the article just consists of a one-line sentence with no references that is already covered in the translation, it would be safe to overwrite.

In case you want to extend an existing article which already contains relevant content, you can start a translation and translate only the parts you want to incorporate to the exiting article. Then, you can publish the result under your user namespace, and copy the result into the original article manually. That is, opening both of them in edit mode and copying content from one to the other.

Continue translations already published

Once you have published a translation as a wiki page it is still possible to continue working with the translation. You can access the "Published" view from the translation dashboard and click the pencil button to continue your work. However, you need to consider that the translation will not incorporate any changes that were done after the translation is published.

It is possible to publish a translation, continue translating and publish it again overwriting the previous publication. However, this has the risk (especially on high-traffic wikis) of overwriting contributions that were made to the published page by other editors. So be very careful, and check the history tab after re-publishing a translation if you ever do that.