User:Contraexemplo/Outreachy/Daily notes/February 2018

February 8
I finally have time to write down my thoughts. It's been a while, right?

The last few weeks were very exhausting and hasty. For instance, I barely had time to sit down and write my bi-weekly reports — I was constantly focused on reaching out and talking to people. I felt a great amount of guilt if I tried to do something else, fearing I was losing time I could dedicate to the outreach. Fortunately, things are starting to get back to normal now.

Wikimedia blog post
This task certainly stalled for some time, but I finally ended reviewing what I wrote and covering every single important point. Since others review might take some time, it may suffer some changes and I am two bi-weekly reports behind, I decided to publish my version on my blog.


 * English version: Bringing documentation to light
 * Brazilian Portuguese version: Colocando a documentação em foco

It is frustrating that I didn't submitted it this way some weeks ago, but it also has some advantages:


 * I found the EF EPI index, which was really useful to build some hypotheses and understand which native speakers of some languages need special attention.
 * Displaying data of the Help:Contents translation rate and pageviews side by side was also really insightful. I am especially impressed with how much people who presumably speak Arabic look for user guides, even though the translation rate is low. It makes me wonder how much of the pageviews of the English version of Help:Contents are from people whose native language isn't English.
 * I wanted to record video guides but editing videos and having good audio equipment is difficult. I ended up writing a shorter version of the Translate extension documentation with some complementary visual resources. I tried to do what I wished I had when beginning to contribute to MediaWiki: a straight-forward guide that let me know the most important aspects of the tools I am about to use. I want to improve it later, but it was certainly uplifting to see it ready.

Outreach
Things happen in a very slow pace and this is absolutely frustrating but expected. Most of universities are starting their academic years right now, so I didn't receive reponses in the first days. I decided to contact students directly, and most of them pointed out that Facebook is the main mean of contact. I tried to create an account there (didn't have one for a long time!), but that attempt was unsuccessful due to Facebook policies on disclosing the user identity. Providing the information they asked didn't work, and soon they deactivated my account.

My next step was using Twitter to find students of various universities and ask for their help. People from different universities (UFSC, UnB, UFOP, USP) offered me help. I ended up creating some promotional material though I am no designer, and sending them instructions on how to present the initiative.

Published this tweet to test out a flyer I made exploring the relationship of Wikipedia with MediaWiki.

Since my attempts to contact people from my own university weren't working, I went there in person a couple of times. First, in the department responsible for all the means of communication -- social networks, newspaper, website. I had a talk with the director of the department explaining the nature of my project and they said they are willing to help. I sent them the material and instructions, but I had problems with their email firewall and had to send it again a couple of times using my university's email address. I also sent it out to my own undergraduate colleagues and all tech-related undergraduates.

I also had a meeting with the coordinator of the language school of my university. She thinks it will be more effective to meet students in their classrooms and talk about the project, presenting it as an opportunity to make volunteer work. However, she expressed some concerns: that, naturally, knowing a foreign language doesn't make you a good translator; and this may disturb the learning process for some because they advise against building bridges between two languages -- they want students to associate words with ideas.

During this period, I couldn't help but question: are we really ready to welcome new translators? Or people that know other languages, but never were a translator? Those people need proper training -- nothing fancy, something that will help them understand the process behind translating. After all, bad translations can be really as harmful as no translations at all.

Looking back
I updated the Outreach strategies page with more information about the initial outreach. I will add more information tomorrow exploring solutions to the problems in the translation process I mentioned. Today, I focused on evaluating my efforts and asking myself what went wrong, what did work and what I can't really be certain of (and why).

I was feeling really hopeless when I had the meeting with Benoît and Johan today. Sometimes it feels like this is a task beyond my limits. I think about how it could work if I had more time, or I had more technical power to solve some things and get pretty pessimistic. But I am trying to focus on thinking that I explored a lead they wanted to for long a time. If this didn't happen, they would never know things like proper proceedings and level of difficulty to make this work. So this was, to some extent, a useful experiment.

Changing focus
I will still see if I get any response from the initial outreach, but now that we know university students as a whole are difficult to reach and build a consistent strategy, I will focus on only those who are studying to become translators. While anyone can be a translator with a bit of dedication and training, those people have a special motivator to engage in this kind of activity: professional experience.


 * Johan suggested that I could try to create a translation team to test this kind of experience. This is actually a wonderful idea! Translation efforts in the Wikimedia movement are usually anarchic, lone and independent. This isn't bad per se, but having teams is useful to coordinate efforts and establish conventions.
 * So, first, I will look for students with the intent of building a team. This is way more direct than simply promoting the role of the technical translator. I will reach them making explicit that my purpose is to create a force task to improve localization practices on MediaWiki. This is going to happen this week, after the evaluation period is over. If needed, I will add one to two days to this outreach period.
 * Then, after gathering two from four people, I will ask them about their level of experience and what they think they will need to perform this task (like documentation) and how many hours they can dedicate to this task. I will make a training and take notes on what they find sufficient and insufficient or confused and well explained.
 * Together, we'll define a couple of pages to translate in the next four days and create a shared document (or page -- it would be awesome if I could encourage them to use wiki tools only to make the process public). If there is something, like a word, which meaning is not clear, we write it down in the document and have a little discussion about it.
 * After the four day period, I have a meeting with them and discuss what they think about the translation process, if they intend to keep contributing, what might keep them engaged and what could be improved.

Now, we were talking about having a way to reward them. What if I gave them a certificate of participation after this experiment for their help? This would be beneficial for us all. So here's a task for tomorrow: search for how I could make this happen.