Talk:Wikimedia Language engineering/Incubator conversations

Incubator Suggestions

1. What specific technical areas should the Wikimedia Foundation prioritize for the Incubator?
   • Expediting the language approval process in a faster way
   • Simplifying template importing process
   • Allowing for better page search features (currently it is hard to find code errors for templates as the search does not look through the coding for specific words)
   • Enhancing the efficiency of site set-up process (many new projects currently involve communities whom are often non-tech savvy, making it difficult for them to adjust in contributing in the incubator for their language due to the incubator's very technical nature)
   • Integrating content translation and Wikidata (The fastest way for contributors to make new pages/articles seems to be through translating existing articles from other languages that they understand. It is quite cumbersome for them to import the pages from other languages into their projects as there is no content translation tool that is available on the Incubator like the one on Wikipedia for existing language Wikipedias)
2. What potential solutions can address challenges in the technical areas that need to be prioritized?
   • Providing a progress bar for each test project which lists down specific goals to improve the test projects to improve the approval process. (a progress bar helps tremendously in giving contributors incentive to continue contributing until the project is approved. Currently many do not know the status of their projects due to not having an obvious indicator if things are going well or not)
   • Providing basic templates that are commonly used built into the basic projects at the start of a project (ie: citation, references, infobox, main page. Communities seem to feel more enthusiastic about contributing when the pages they make resemble existing Wiki projects instead of just being bare bones)
   • Improving prefix compatibility with template coding (Currently the option to auto insert prefix into the coding is buggy, I have stopped using it for the time being and have not tried it for a few months, so I am unsure if improvements have been done)
   • Increase number of language committee members that aid in project approval processes. (There seems to be quite a lag between Language Committee members responding to approval requests due to only having one or two members responding for very few days or even weeks)
3. What aspects of language onboarding can the affiliates/communities concentrate their efforts on?
   • Template translations such as references, infobox, main page.
   • Having a more compact and precise list of common pages needed to be available in the project.
   • Setting weekly/monthly goals for page creation/translation with specific themes.

I am unsure if this is how to answer the questions as I don't fully understand them, but I hope my answers help bring more ideas in some way.

Thank you. Ultron90 (talk) 17:47, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for sharing your recommendations! These are super valuable insights and we will include them in the planning phase. I will ping you for any questions or next steps as they come up. Srish 02:49, 29 January 2024 (UTC)