Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions

Sometimes there are major announcements or newsletters that get translated into one or more other languages. I'd like to have proper support for translating them.

I don't necessarily want to integrate the translate extension here. What I really want is to have a button on the original post that says "Look, there are translations available!", and when you click on them, they show the translated version (maybe side-by-side with the original?).

This feature would help people who don't all speak the same language to participate in the same conversation, instead of having discussions split up according to language. Since Flow will work on multiple projects, I believe this will be an increasingly important issue.

OT: Why post announcements or newsletters through Flow? I'd think they're content pages.

Making messages translateable should be a config option, off by default. I can see merit and use-case for this idea. More on this below. :-)

• It's useful at Meta-wikis.
• In majority of Wikimedia projects discussions happen in one language in the first place, and meaning of a discussion is easy to lose in translation.
• There would be a need in a lot of effort to review the translations which I suspect (in my personal view, anyway) would not be worth it on most wikis.
• I also envision, personally, meta-wikis for each Wikimedia project (one meta wiki for Wikipedia, one for Wikibooks, one for Commons, etc), where all news and collaboration for this family of projects is located — and I also expect some of mailing lists to migrate to Flow if they like.

Gryllida: "Why post announcements or newsletters through Flow?" For the same reason that we post them on people's user talk pages or on central noticeboards now.

I think that "off by default" is fine. I think that if, say, the WMF legal team needs to make an announcement or hold a discussion, that having the option of translating the messages (or at least the main announcement) would be handy for them. Something like Tech/News, which is routinely translated, would probably also benefit from it.

I've added a mockup of an idea by Qgil, to Extension talk:Newsletter#Drafting_specs_33250.

I prefer the idea of having Newsletters delivered via Echo, because

• that way everyone comes to a centralpage to read the one main copy (as with The Signpost, or Books&Bytes), and any corrections can be made at the central location.
• It would prevent usertalk pages from being constantly bumped in everyone's watchlists.
• The newsletter copies on usertalk often clutter search results
• The newsletters fill usertalk archives, or have to be manually pruned.

but I think having both as options (and possibly "email" too) is ideal, so that people can choose what suits them.

We're definitely going to do some work on newsletter support in Flow -- probably not in the super short-term, but probably in a few months. I don't know if the idea for translation support has come up yet; thanks for sharing the idea!