Content translation/Boost

Content translation's Boost initiative is aimed at expanding the use of translation to help more communities to grow. By enabling new and more visible ways to contribute by using translation, we expect communities to attract new editors, and expand the knowledge available in their languages.

Document compiling example scenarios where new ways to contribute with translation can help content to propagate across wikis more fluently

Content translation has been successful in supporting the translation process on many Wikipedia communities. It has already helped to create thousands of new articles while encouraging the creation of good quality translations. However, we identified potential for expanding its use to more contexts that can benefit from translation:

• Translation can be used by more wikis. The adoption of Content translation varies significantly from wiki to wiki, and there are wikis with potential to benefit from using translation more.
• Translation can be used in more ways. Currently, Content translation focuses on creating new articles on desktop. Supporting new kinds of contribution such as expanding existing articles with new sections, or mobile translation enable more opportunities to contribute.

Please, provide any feedback about this initiative in the discussion page. We are interested in hearing your ideas on how to help communities grow by using translation.

This initiative is part of a long-term vision to support cross-wiki content propagation, and it is aligned with the Wikimedia Foundation plans to "Grow participation globally, focusing on emerging markets" and increasing "Worldwide readership". More details and updates are provided below.

Initial ideas on how to support section translation on desktop and mobile to expand articles.

Goals and impact

Play media

Language showcase 2019, featuring the Boost project and Javanese Wikimedia community feedback about Content Translation

These are the main goals for the project and metrics to measure them:

• Grow the community of translators. Attract more users to translate (using different devices) that remain active over time and help recruit new translators.
  • Metric: Increase the percentage of new editors that completed their second translation in a month.
• Grow the content available. Increase the coverage in both the topics available and their depth (information they contain).
  • Metric: Double the number of weekly translations on selected wikis (to create new content or extend existing one).

Communities involved

We want to focus on Wikipedias with potential to grow by using translation. Wikipedias with less than 100K articles, a significant editing activity for the size of their wiki (more than 70 active editors), and making little use of translation currently (less than 100 translations per month).

Given the above, we initially selected the following Wikipedias: Malayalam, Bengali, Tagalog, Javanese, and Mongolian.

As the project becomes more visible, other communities showed interest in the project, and some initiatives will be applied there too. These Wikipedias are Central Bikol, Albanian and Arabic.

Additional considerations

This small group of wikis represents a much larger group of communities that can grow with the proposed improvements. Selecting a small set allows us to focus and collaborate more closely with them. Nevertheless, we expect the improvements to benefit a larger number of wikis, and users form all wikis are definitely welcome to participate.

This list is considered a preliminary selection. Once we complete the initial communication we'll get a better understanding of the interest of those communities to get involved in the project, and the final list may change.

Provide your feedback

Please, provide any feedback about this initiative in the discussion page. We are interested in hearing your ideas on how to help communities grow by using translation.

You can also check the project in Phabricator to track the progress of the different tasks and share any comment about them.

Scope

We want knowledge to propagate across languages more fluently. These are the initial work areas considered:

• Make Content translation more visible. This involves making the tool available by default, expose the tool more visibly at relevant places, surface relevant content gaps, and customize the process to meet the needs of the community. In this way, more editors will be able to find relevant content to translate.
• Increase the coverage of content for existing articles. Explore ideas to expand existing articles by translating new sections. This will enable users to expand existing articles with new aspects to cover the topic in more detail.
• Support translation on more devices. Support translation from mobile devices to provide more opportunities for contribution on any device, enabling new editors to participate.

These areas are based on our experience working on Content translation, the user feedback received and previous research. However, specific research for this project will inform the specific work areas to consider.

Status updates

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January 2020

• Improved support for references by preventing duplicate references in the source article.
• Update of testing servers to support the new parsing system.
• Content translation enabled by default for Afrikaans, Icelandic, Latvian, and Nepali Wikipedias.

December 2019

• Updated test server instances with recent technology versions as required by recent MediaWiki updates.
• Enabled server support for Content translation in two new Wikipedias: Sakizaya (szy) and Mon (mnw) Wikipedias.
• Support for the Wiki for Human Rights initiative by creating a URL campaign in Content translation.
• More reliable support for highlighting sentences across original and translated content and preventing wrongly formatted duplicates of ISBN links.
• Support for compatibility with the new version of the parsing system.
• Content translation configured to be enabled as a default tool (out of beta) for newly created Wikipedias

November 2019

• Content translation enabled by default for Albanian Wikipedia after editors request.
• Better integrated invites for users to translate when creating a new article, showing a specific article to translate or a one-time general invite depending on the context.
• Compilation of prolific translators in selected wikis to raise awareness of our initiatives and plan further research.
• Infrastructure to set up a local instance of Oups MT based on Marian Neural Machine Translation.
• Section translation research preparations: research brief, test protocol, and recruitment communications (participant screener, community messages, and direct messages)

October 2019

• Initial design ideas and prototypes for section translation.
• Started conversations with all selected communities (Malayalam, Bengali, Tagalog, Javanese, and Mongolian) with potential to grow with translation.
• Improved discoverability by basic support for surfacing specific translation suggestion as an alternative to create an article from scratch.
• Content translation enabled by default for Tagalog, Central Bikol, Malayalam, Bengali, and Mongolian Wikipedias.
• Better guidance by encouraging to complete old translations with a notification after 3 months.
• Expand machine translation by allowing external tools to use all language pairs even if restricted by their Wikipedia communities.

September 2019

• Content translation enabled by default for Javanese Wikipedia (announcement)
• Clearer entry points by removing redundant invite to translate.
• Improved entry points with more reliable placement for the interlanguage links dialog and reduced performance penalty for readers.

August 2019

• Improved discoverability by providing an updated invite to propose translating instead of creating an article from scratch, avoid unnecessary steps when searching for the article to translate, and surfacing the persistent entry points in a more reliable way using global preferences.
• Improved suggestions by surfacing suggestions as the default view when users are not working on any translation already, making it possible to link to any specific view in the dashboard, providing smarter services to find potential source articles for a given title in another language and potential translators, and use a more clear visual metaphor to keep suggestions for later.
• Better control for users to keep suggestions for later by keeping the "for later" list visible for all languages.
• Exposing better content gaps by showing the suggestions view by default when the user has no in-progress translations.

July 2019

• Better support for exposing the tool as default by supporting settings to disable the entry points for wikis where the tool is out of beta.
• Better guidance for users by showing an invite to try the main entry point to those users that discovered the tool through a non-persistent invite so that they learn how to find the tool the next time.