Topic on Talk:Content translation

Despite me clicking on the references paragraph on the translation page and it loading, when i publish it there are no references

Confirm the same problem. When references are formatted in a template like cite web, cite book or similar inside a reference, the template can not be converted or edited as in other article text. The last time I did a manual job, see revision history of en:Endless tape cartridge.

Wondering when we can expect this issue to be fixed?

Thanks for the feedback.

Content Translation uses the default editing surface that browsers provide, which makes it hard to deal with complex content such as templates. We are currently working on a new version of Content Translation with a more solid editing surface (the same Visual Editor uses). The new version is still in development but can be used already to translate articles.

The new editing surface enables us to improve the support for templates, but there are still some issues that need to be fixed. This is the list of issues related to references that we have identified in version 2. In particular, I created a ticket to capture the issue described by @Hans Haase. Feel free to add any details or make any corrections if I have not captured anything accurately (inspecting the German version of the article and the template information was not trivial since I don't know the language). If there are similar issues, I'd encourage to report since there are many factors into play and each case may be different (e.g., some templates are not connected through Wikidata, others may lack templateData, etc.).

@Doc James, regarding to the timing for the fixes, this is one of our priorities and we are already working in this area. You can check from the above list that several tickets are marked for the August-September period, which means we expect to complete them by the end of this month. Having said that, this is a complex area since templates were not made to be easy to convert across language-specific Wikipedias so technical difficulties may appear along the way.

In any case, improvements will happen only on version 2 since it will replace version 1 in the future. We encourage the more advanced users to start using version 2 and reporting what works and what does not in this area. Thanks!

Thanks, I was translating from German to English. As there are no relevant edits, there is not Revision import. So the Source and results can be seen from the moments of the revision histories. As I am the author of the article, I was translating it nearly at once and I did translations on related articles before.

The fix for the reported issue has been deployed. Adding references to the translation should be more reliable now. Thanks for all the details which have been very useful to make progress in this front.

Note that for the process to work it is necessary that the templates are connected through Wikidata (for the tool to know which template to use in the target language) and metadata is available to find out which are the corresponding parameters to copy the information from one to another. For the later step, the tool looks in templateData for parameters with some coincidence in their names and aliases. Now, it also considers citoid information to figure out equivalent parameters, which should improve the support for reference-related templates. Improving cases like the one in the example (although there are still other cases that require improvements).

One way to help making the mapping more solid is to provide templateData information for frequently used templates.

Hum. Just tested it. This was what happened when I used "version 2" https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%88%A9%E7%94%A8%E8%80%85:Doc_James/Angioedema It did not work at all.

By the way when I add the infobox I get a puzzle piece that is crossed out. I than go to the right panel and click "keep original template"

Just testing how the tool works if one does not include the infobox in the translation. Unfortunately that too works really poorly. Here is an example https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%88%A9%E7%94%A8%E8%80%85:Doc_James/Baker%27s_cyst

Also sentences are going missing when using "Content Translation 2". Specifically the first sentence of each paragraph has disappeared...

In that last link I posted in the last paragraph ref [1], [2], [3], [4], and [5] have all turned into ref [5].