User:Contraexemplo/Outreachy/Daily notes/January 2018

Changing phases
We've finally reached the initial outreach phase. Even though it was highly antecipated by me, it is still quite unsettling. As we approach the moment to put to practice everything I have learned and thought about, I begin to notice the weight of my responsability as an Outreachy intern and I am quite nervous about it. One of the questions going through my mind now is: how much room for failure do I have? Even better: how can I actually measure success or failure?

Anyway, let's talk about strategies.

Punctual, immediate, but effective: Translathon and Translation Rally
One month ago, as I asked about good initiatives made towards translation efforts and Benoît mentioned Translation marathons. Here are some tasks about them on Phabricator: T91108, T132468. Related pages on translatewiki: translatewiki:Project:VisualEditor/2015 Translathon.

The number of people that worked on them is remarkable and the progress they made, impressive.

Since one of the ways to promote values and good initiatives in Wikimedia projects is publishing a blog post, I decided to take a look into what was written about translations in the last seven years or so. One post caught my attention: A translation rally invites volunteers to localize technical messages for MediaWiki software. According to it, they had a financial incentive: they divided 450 EUR between those translators who met the goal, with a 50 EUR bonus for the person with more translations. As translatewiki:Project:Rally-2015-05 states, 27 people participated and the bounty was 21.74 EUR per person.

Of course, this is not a long-term fix to the translation problem. But it is a fine solution to accomplish short-term goals and brings the community together. For now, I am considering planning one, but this needs to be discussed with Johan and Benoît first.

Common reason
I began to interview some FLOSS translators and noticed their motives to contribute are more or less the same:
 * 1) They want to improve the translation. They spotted some mistakes and wanted to make it better.
 * 2) They believe knowledge and technology should be more accessible.

Motive #2 is especially good for Wikimedia Foundation since one of its core values is open knowledge. And here is how things need to be framed so people relate the benefit of translated user guides with open knowledge: when more people are able to understand the tools they are using, more people are able to contribute.

Call for translators
I mentioned yesterday I am interviewing translators but I did not state why and how. My bad.

I am trying to calibrate my expectations and plans for this phase with experiences from other people. I am making a call for volunteer translators on Twitter and on Mastodon to ask them about their motives, why they volunteered (or are still volunteering) and what they think are some of the greatest barriers for newcomers. After reading logs. documentation and knowing more about the history of Wikimedia Foundation and its projects, I, of course, have some hypothesis. But it's a good general practice to speak with others and see how closer I am to the truth.

I didn't make this last month because a lot of people were inactive due the holidays and I thought it was better to have my own opinions before asking for external insight. Therefore, I wanted to avoid being influenced, as Benoît warned me some people tend to be quite passionate about their point of view.

I considered making a survey (and I am still open to this option) but for now, it's been quite effective to have conversations with translators directly. People who work with translations are really diverse and talking to them is giving me the opportunity to understand some nuances. I also thought about using the Translators mailing list to make the same call since I noticed people work on other projects but I am not sure if it's a good idea.