Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Article suggestion - new feature for Content Translation
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- Article suggestion - new feature for Content Translation
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- Newly introduced article suggestion feature in Content Translation makes it easier for users to find Wikipedia articles that can be translated into other languages.
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Content Translation's new "suggestions" page brings up ideas for articles to translate into your language. Try it out! Screenshot by Runa Bhattacharjee, CC0 1.0/public domain.
Content Translation started off last year as an ambitious experiment to create a convenient way to contribute content to Wikipedia. Translating well-written articles into other languages has been a long-standing practice among Wikipedia editors, but doing so has not always been user-friendly. With this in mind, and supported by studies on content overlap between Wikipedia's languages, the first versions of the Content Translation tool were made available in phases to all 289 Wikipedias. The tool is still in active development; new features and improvements are being introduced regularly.
Suggestions
While designing Content Translation, we've put a major emphasis on making the tool a simple workboard through which users can translate articles. A key element is helping users identify suitable content/articles that can be translated. While multiple methods currently exist, the newest is a list of suggested articles that the user can choose from—see the images that accompany the post.
Presently, this list consists of Wikipedia's featured articles that are missing in other languages. Suggestions are supported for many of the common language pairs that have been used for translating articles, and we are increasing this list every week. As a large number of articles across all languages have been translated from English—about 60%!—users can always find a list of featured articles from the English Wikipedia that are missing in other languages.
While viewing the suggested article list, users can:
- select an article and start translating
- choose to mark it for translation at a later time, or
- dismiss uninteresting articles from the list displayed to them
Upcoming
Coming soon, you'll be able to store articles in Content Translation for later. Screenshot by Runa Bhattacharjee, CC0 1.0/public domain.
Article lists and suggestions are the stepping stones for a larger set of features that will foster engagement between the Content Translation tool and its users. In the coming months, users will be able to build collections and lists of articles. We expect these customized lists to be of particular help for topic-based Wikipedia translation events or projects. If you have participated or organized a translation campaign/translathon (or any other event that involved article creation through translations), we would like to hear from you for our research! You can start participating by filling this form.
A few months ago, the Wikimedia Foundation's Research team started a project to determine personalized suggestions of topics that may be of interest for our editors. While the scope of the project is much larger, Content Translation’s suggestion feature intersects with this project. In future, we expect the personalized article suggestions, as determined by the Research team’s ongoing work, to also be displayed in Content Translation’s article suggestion list.
As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions through our project talk page and Phabricator. We are particularly interested to hear more about the article list feature—your experiences and ideas will help us make it better.
Runa Bhattacharjee, Language Engineering, Wikimedia Foundation
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Ideas for social media messages promoting the published post:
Twitter (@wikimedia/@wikipedia):
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Facebook/Google+
- Requested categories and tags for the post:
- categories: Editor engagement
- tags: content translation, internationalization and iocalization, language engineering, translation