Topic on Talk:Growth/2023

I see this:

• We keep in close communication with the communities our team affects, so that our work remains grounded in reality.

and am just curious how one can be in touch with, say, Korean wikipedia community

Hi @Ottawahitech -- thank you for your question. There are several ways that we keep in close communication with communities:

• We have four "target" wikis, which are the wikis to which we first deploy features to try them out. In each of those target wikis, we have a part-time ambassador drawn from the experienced editor community. We meet weekly with the ambassadors, and they are able to communicate to their communities about our work in the local language, and tell our team about the opinions and preferences of their communities.
• We distribute a regular newsletter that gets posted to the talk pages of anyone who is interested. Those newsletters are translated into many languages. You can view past newsletters and sign up to receive them here.
• We post weekly short updates on this page.
• Community members can also follow along on our work in Phabricator. For instance, on this Phabricator task where we are working on "guidance" for newcomer tasks, our current project.

Does this answer your question?

Sure is nice to get a reply so quickly!

i guess what i am mostly curious about is how to communicate with people who speak a different language such as Korean. I know one can use google translate, but i find it very time consuming. Thanks

@Ottawahitech -- our approach is to work with people who are multilingual. Our ambassadors, for instance, speak English and their native language (and others!), and so they are able to talk with the Growth team in English and with their communities in the local language. They also use these skills to translate newsletters and other communications. You may be able to find people who speak multiple languages by using categories. For instance, this page lists users on mediawiki.org who speak certain languages. Working with multilingual people solves most of our issues, but we also do use Google Translate from time to time, which helps us get a sense of a local conversation.

<grin>Wow a second response in a few minutes is a first for me, i think. </grin>

i guess i am kind of wasting everyones time by posting here without organizing my thoughts. What i was getting at was the general difficulty of communicating with others who dont use our language. The reason i mentioned Korean was because i recently participated in a discussion proposing the deletion of a Korean wmf project . The discussion is in english.

Oops forgot tomention, i must logoff now

Unfortunately, not all projects have an ambassador to do the translation work. And English is the common language over the Wikimedia movement.

We are always looking for people who speak multiple languages to facilitate conversations.

Thanks Trizek (WMF) (tfor replying.. and sigh..

I got the impression from looking around (for example here: https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Travellers%27_pub#Babel_templates) that wikipedia had some magic software tool that could help in translation? I guess not and we are dependent on having thousands of volunteers running around translating vast amounts of text.

Other compagnies provide translation engines. That's a first tool to use when you are facing a text you don't understand. Have a magic button that roughly translate a text directly when you are reading the wikis would be a nice technical wish.

Until then, we will have to rely on volunteer translators.

Thanks again Trizek (WMF) ,

Is there a list somewhere of translation engines provided by other (free/ ad supprted) companies? I find google translate very cumbersome.

Thanks in advance,

I would say "on Wikipedia". :)

I use google Translate, because of the number of languages covered. I'm more and more moving to https://www.deepl.com/translator; still proprietary, but less Google, fastest and more precise (at least on the EN <-> FR translations I use).

thanks for the link I will try it out when I get a chance. I just hope it does not collapse when the wiki-herds discover it :-)