Talk:Wikipedia.org Portal Project

Past conversations regarding the Wikimedia.org portal can be found on Meta-wiki.

Currently "WikipediA" wordmark at the top of portal page is realized through untranslatable SVG-sprite. While the subtitle "free encyclopedia" is localized. What about localize "WikipediA" wordmark? This is translated and converted into local writing system in most languages (see commons:Category:Localized Wikipedia globe logos, v2 and translatewiki:Special:PrefixIndex/MediaWiki:Wikibase-sitelinks-wikipedia).

@Kaganer your right that there is a lot of translated logos readily available. However, the difficulty here is that on the wikipedia.org page we use the wordmark separately from the globe logo, and the translated versions all have the globe-logo and the wordmark together.

May be used label from d:Q52

Please give me any way for viewing portal page in manually defined language (that differenced from browser language or system language). This is very important for testing localisation in the indigenous languages.

@Kaganer sorry, but currently the wikipedia.org page only responds to system/browser languages. However, you can override these browser languages quite easily.

Firefox supports a wide range of indigenous languages (Aymara, Chichewa, Inupiaq, Inuktitut, Cree, Navajo, to name a few).So if you go into Firefox settings and manually add these languages to your preferred languages, they will appear on the wikipedia.org page. This video show how to change the languages in Firefox.

Thanks. I'm used chromium-based browser. This change is possible (not for any language), but unuseful. Please consider adding this feature (as example, as "&uselang=<langcode>" option for url).

Maybe m:Www.wikipedia.org_template (with subpages) and m:Www.wikipedia.org portal is obsoleted now and needs to be marked as "historical"?

I added a note to the talk page of Www.wikipedia.org_template awhile back. For some reason I didn't add it to the main page. I think that was because it would break something if I did at the time. @DTankersley (WMF) or @JDrewniak (WMF) can you help me remember why we didn't want to touch the page and if it's OK to do so now? There is similar notice on the talk page of the second page you mention. There I think it's fine to mark the page as historical. Thanks for bringing it up Kaganer.

Both pages need to be marked as 'historical', big thanks to @CKoerner (WMF) if you can do that! :)

Funny enough, I'm not an admin on Meta! :) @Kaganer could I bother you for some help please?

This is done for m:Www.wikipedia.org portal.

Also please watch for three LUA modules in Meta: m:Module:Project portal, m:Module:Project portal/wikis, m:Module:Project portal/views. As far as I understand, they are still used for other portals?

Thanks, @Kaganer for the update! I'm not exactly sure if our new portal automation is still using those pages. I'll ping @JDrewniak (WMF) on that part.

@Kaganer yes that's true. Other portal pages are still using the above mentioned Lua modules (there is some in progress work to modernize the wiktionary portal though).

Hi, I very much hope that this is the correct venue for this question: I assume that you already discussed making the entire page translatable, not just the "The free encyclopedia" header. (For example, I think that it would be nice if readers from Germany could see "Wikipedia wird von der Wikimedia Foundation betrieben, einer gemeinnützigen Organisation, die auch eine Reihe anderer Projekte betreibt." instead of "Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that also hosts a range of other projects.") Where can I find out more about why you decided not to include this feature? Or is it instead possible to request this? Thanks!

I believe the biggest challenge is that the portal page currently has no concept of being logged in. Without that, we don't really know what language the user speaks.

Hi Kevin! If I'm not mistaken, the page currently extracts the preferred language from the browser settings. This is how the heading is displayed in different languages. For example, I am seeing "Wikipedia Die freie Enzyklopädie" at the top, instead of "Wikipedia The free encyclopedia".

Hi - thanks for the input on this issue. We've talked many times about localizing the whole portal page but haven't come up with a clear-cut way to do it that is fast loading and doesn't cause issues with slower internet connections.

However, I created a ticket that will start the process of getting the translations and if/when they start coming in via translatewiki, we can easily (hopefully!) merge them into our normal update process for the portal.

Cheers!

Hi Deb, thank you for creating a task on Phabricator. I'm wondering whether translating the entire page will really make the page much slower than just translating part of it. Can you maybe also show me the Phabricator task(s) dealing with this question? Thanks!

Hi @Gnom, your right, the translations currently happen via the browser settings.

I'll do my best to summarize why some people (maybe just me) had some hesitations about translating the entire page.

The portal page is a static HTML page, and the translations are done 'client-side' in the users browser with javascript, instead of serving the browser an already translated page. This means that first, the page loads in english, then the parts that need translating are hidden (currently just the globe), then we use javascript to pull the needed translations, update the page, and unhide the translated parts. We hide the translatable parts to avoid a "flash of unstyled content". This makes the page seem to load slower (here's the filmstrip view, note how the globe links load last).

My concern is that if we translate the rest of the page, we would have to hide all the elements on the page while the translation file loads, and then unhide them, and this might make the page look like it's loading slower. Some might think that hiding the elements while the translation file loads is unneccesary, but in this very early demo you can see how the globe looks if we don't hide the translatable parts, the translations are very sudden and jumpy.

----

All that being said, translating the rest of the page in this fashion might still be better then having no translations at all. We already minimize the load time by saving the translations in the browser so that they are only loaded once, and there are a few more optimizations we can make to improve the loading experience.

This technical approach was discussed briefly on phabricator on this ticket, https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T121843

Hi Jan (wow, so many different people responding to my question!), Thank you for your comment. I very much understand that load time is a key issue. However, I was wondering whether we should try to translate the entire page since we have apparently already decided to translate a part of it - especially since a key element of that page is to showcase that Wikipedia is a multilingual project.

Hi, please allow me to ask again, since I am having a hard time trying to understand the various Phabricator tasks: Will there be translations of wikipedia.org? And is there anything I can help with? Thanks!

Hi @Gnom, thanks for asking!

We've got all the requests into translatewiki for the portal page text that needs to be translated. We've gotten quite a bit of translations already entered in but it seems like we are always needing more! The phabricator task description has the additional text we're looking for - so depending on your language knowledge, you might be able to help.

Here's a link to our project in translatewiki that you look at: https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special:Translate&group=wikimedia-portals&filter=translated&language=de&action=translate. If you are not used to this format, you'll need to click on the drop-down near the top of the right hand side of the page to 'translate into {your language}' to see what is left to do. The link I used above is to view the translations for the portal that are needed/completed in German.

Thanks again for helping with the translations! We hope to get what we've collected into production (on the Wikipedia.org portal page) soon!

Please add new set of messages into this group in TWN for further translation:

1. Wikipedia apps are now available:
2. Download for $os on the $store
3. View full [[$list|list of available Wikipedia apps]]

(or similar code)

Hi @Kaganer - the app links are still being evaluated in a long term test; once the test is done and all is good, we'll add in a request for that text to be translated.

We do have a new request in at translatewiki to get the licensing information translated: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T153764.