Wikipedia talk:Pages needing translation into English/Archive 3

Moving older requests to categories
Hey, so I removed the list of articles from 2012 after making sure they were all appropriately tagged, but Yngvadottir put it back.

I've done this with other maintenance pages that have both lists and categories. Part of the problem of lists is that they create an additional maintenance burden. When an article is fixed and the tag is removed, often that article is not removed from the list. Occasionally someone needs to go through the list and decide if the articles without tags were already fixed, or if they were never tagged in the first place.

I don't mind people using lists if it motivates them to work on articles by special request. After a year or more, though, if no one has responded to it, it doesn't seem any more important than any of the other requests that have been made through the category system. I think the categories are in general more useful; if someone knows a particular language, there's a wider selection of articles in the category so they are more likely to find something that interests them, and they don't have to sort through articles that need translation from languages they don't know.

So, to keep the maintenance burden low without destroying whatever benefit the list may have, I expire requests that have been sitting around for a long time, and make sure they were in fact tagged and any helpful comments are on the article talk page.

If a by-month-requested list would be helpful, I would suggest having a bot tag the articles. Then people who don't know the language for the oldest requests could go recruit people who do, but because it uses a category that queue would actually have all the articles in need, not just the ones on this page. -- Beland (talk) 20:46, 11 December 2014 (UTC)


 * I disagree because work on the articles listed on this noticeboard proceeds at vastly divergent paces; there are other variables in addition to original language, including topic, length, and how bad the original translation is. Some of us do work methodically on articles that require knowledge of one or more particular languages, but others graze the list. Some of these articles get worked on by several people, and some editors prefer to post that they think they've finished an article so that it can be checked by someone else. Having a list as well as a category facilitates this and does no great harm - it's easy to see that it's organized chronologically and so one is free to ignore or priorize the older entries. (There's one you removed today that I've worked on and keep intending to return to - if it's not on the page I'm far less likely to remember to do that, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.) Someone recently added to the page a number of articles that had been placed in the categories but not entered on this noticeboard - I promptly did one. So to me the double listing - at the category and here - is a good thing not a defect. And I particularly don't see the utility of dropping those that have been on the board longest. They're likely to be hard nuts and the reader needs them fixing all the more for that. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:57, 11 December 2014 (UTC)


 * OK, I leave it to you to clean up obsolete listings. -- Beland (talk) 22:41, 17 December 2014 (UTC)


 * How about collapsing older sections, though? There is a lot to scroll through. It's simple enough to click "Show" to see the collapsed section. We could collapse 2012 and 2013 now, then 2014 at the end of this year and so on, or have a six-month cycle. As the OP says, it would also help if everyone would remove the articles from the list when they have completed the work to their own satisfaction, or put a proud Done against them Noyster  (talk),  10:15, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Malayalam on Google Translator
Malayalam is one of the languages, if not the language, most commonly used in articles posted here but not supported by Google Translator, and the only one of the four major Dravidian languages not previously supported. For what it's worth, I just noticed Google Translator now handles it. —Largo Plazo (talk) 18:02, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

Requested move 24 February 2015

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: Not Moved any inconsistencies or confusion as to the scope of this page based on the current title can and should be addressed in the instructions. Mike Cline (talk) 14:06, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English → Articles needing translation into English – After a couple of edits on this page that essentially contested my request for a draft page to be posted here (1 and 2), I believe that this needs discussion. From how the precedent in Wikipedia interprets the word "Page" in regards to name spaces, it usually refers to all name spaces. If the belief here is that only pages that exist in the article name space should qualify for this translation process and its related templates, then the page should be moved appropriately to reflect this page's scope. However, I oppose this proposed move since I see value in posting pages in the "Draft:" name space here to allow possibly abandoned drafts (such as the one referred to in my example diffs previously mentioned in here [it has not been edited by its creator since May 2014]) to get translated, then moved to the article space by other editors. Either way, if the name stays where it is, then the instructions here would need to be updated to consider pages in name spaces other than the article space. Steel1943 (talk) 21:40, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I admit after doing further reading that I untagged the page based on my conflating the Draft workspace with userspace drafts. The latter aren't supposed to be touched by anyone but the author (unless deletable as BLP violations, spam, copyvios, attack pages) and aren't supposed to have maintenance tags on them (the userfication guidelines call for those to be removed) but the former are free for all to work with. I see your point and I'll revert everything as you'd left it. —Largo Plazo (talk) 22:31, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I appreciate that. However, since is the first time I have ever needed to use this page for any reason whatsoever (when I posted that request was the first time I discovered this page's existence), I'm still a bit curious what its actual scope is due to having "page" in its title, but "article" written in basically all of the instructions. Maybe the instructions need to be updated in a way that considers stale drafts, or even category pages. Steel1943  (talk) 22:44, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
 * This page should stay at "Pages" as it sometimes has more than articles (e.g. files or categories), however drafts should not be part of the scope of this page. This page is not a translation project page (that's what WP:TRANSLATION is for), it is a noticeboard for dealing with problem articles (i.e. articles that are not in English). As far as I am concerned a draft is no different to a userpage or an afc page in that it is the responsibility of the creator to make it ready to be an article (or not as the case maybe), if we were to start listing every non-english draft page as well I suspect we would quickly find the page swamped (and it is not exactly empty now), particularly considering that my understanding is that draft pages are not subject to the article criteria for speedy deletion that clear so many of the pages on here (notability and such)-- Jac 16888 Talk 23:08, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
 * This actually brings up an old issue I had that I couldn't find any answer for in the deletion policy. A while back someone tried to Mfd a sandbox draft that wasn't in English. To my knowledge (haven't read it thoroughly enough), there's nothing in the deletion policy or any other policy about the use of non english languages in draft space. Is it a blindspot in policy or just something that is too minor to really be worried about? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bosstopher (talk • contribs) 23:20, 24 February 2015‎


 * Oppose move. I agree substantially with Jac16888. We shouldn't be restrictive with the name, or too rule-bound, because who knows what may crop up. And after all the noticeboard also lists articles whose translations need improving. However, drafts are drafts, wherever they are located, and so long as they aren't in mainspace, they don't need to be posted here. People work in a variety of ways, including drafting in their native language and then translating. Being in a foreign language already means a draft submitted at AfC fails. And stale drafts are now automatically deleted after 6 months. So there's no reason for a draft to be posted as needing translation. I see others agree and will accordingly remove the draft from the page for the second time. However, since it's in draft space and appears to have been abandoned, there's nothing to prevent someone from translating it anyway. Yngvadottir (talk) 03:17, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Oppose templates may also exist as non-English pages, and should be translated, since they are reader-facing pages. As well as categories which can have descriptions, or be named in a non-English manner. -- 70.51.200.101 (talk) 05:47, 25 February 2015 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Proposed policy to move articles in foreign languages to draft space
Please see  for a discussion of a proposed policy that may impact this project. —sroc &#x1F4AC; 12:19, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

List of archives in France
Where do I ask for help in developing List of archives in France - given that I am creating the various pages on - while I can transfer the various pages to WP they will need more material translated and to be interlinked with the Fr:WP pages. Jackiespeel (talk) 10:15, 2 June 2015 (UTC)
 * For instructions how to handle translations from non-English Wikipedias please see Translation. You can either create stub articles over here and request expansion using a template in the new article, or you can place direct requests at Requested articles. However, these methods only apply to translations from other Wikipedias, and I don't think we have a process for requesting translations from other sources. Please note though that you may copy and paste content from your Wikia, but you should use an attribution template at the bottom of the article page, e.g. . And don't forget to add reliable secondary sources. De728631 (talk) 15:47, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

Albanian school project again?
One year ago we had this surge of Albanian articles that were either redundant, original research or copyvios. Apparently the time has come again and either the students or the teacher seem not to have learned that the Albanian version of Wikipedia should be their point of first contact. De728631 (talk) 20:27, 12 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Ha, you're right, it is a full year later. I was just today thinking "this seems familiar". —Largo Plazo (talk) 21:07, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

Change template verbiage for old pages *not* initially in other-lang?
I'm concerned that the boilerplate "The initial language of this article was FOO" is incorrect in many cases on the project page, in particular for many pages listed which were created in proper English long ago, but which became problematic at a later date.

The Duflu template adds the line "The initial language of this article was FOO" when transcluded by Cleanup-translation which is used to create entries on the project page. However, in many cases, the articles have been around for a while, and in fact the original language was English with proper grammar, sometimes remaining so for many years, before some foreign text or poorly translated text crept in. In these cases, it's misleading to say that the "initial language was FOO", when the article may have a long history of correct English updates.

What I'd like to see instead of the current, misleading verbiage, is an entry with the relevant, necessary data to help a translator/editor with the info needed to proceed, namely 1) that the article contains text in or translated from FOO language, but 2) was initially in English, starting in 3) year created, and remained in English until at least 4) date, or if the exact revision of the offending edit that added the foreign or poorly-translated text from FOO-ish is known, then 5) rev-number & date (instead of param 4). I can well imagine that not all these items would be known at the outset, so the template should be controlled by optional params, which could be filled out as more info was discovered, or left out, defaulting to a simpler statement of fact about the article.

In the moderately filled-out case (with param 4, but not 5) it might read something like this:


 * This article contains text which appears to be in, or a rough translation from FOO. The original article was created in English in yyyy, and appeared to remain so until at least [link-to-old-version-still-in-EN dd-Mon-yyyy].

In the completely filled-out case (with param 5, but not 4) it might read something like this:


 * This article contains text which appears to be in, or a rough translation from FOO. The original article was created in English in yyyy, and remained so until rev [link-to-first-rev-with-added-FOO-text-or-trans rev #vvvvvvvvv of hh:mm:ss, dd-Mon-yyyy].

The default case, with only the language param (or even lacking that one) wouldn't say anything about the "initial language" (so often wrong) but something more like this:


 * This article contains text which appears to be in, or a rough translation from (FOO/an unknown language).

Proposed example (this is taken from an actual entry added to the project page in June 2015, but instead might look like this):


 * ====Elías Figueroa====
 * Elías Figueroa contains text which appears to be a rough translation from an unknown language. The original article was created in English in 2004, and appeared to remain so until at least 30 March 2011.

Not sure which templates should be involved, maybe both Duflu and Cleanup-translation or something else? If this discussion more properly belongs on a Template:Talk page somewhere, feel free to move it there with my blessings, providing a brief synopsis here instead along with a link to the Template talk page it was moved to. Thanks. Mathglot (talk) 00:08, 31 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Why can't we just say
 * "This [article/section] contains text in Elbonian language. Check its history for more details."
 * I don't see why we need to put in the template what editors should be able to find for themselves easily enough. An editor who has done so can add a section with the results to the article's talk page. WP:NOTBURO, I think (and PNT is nice in not having formal closing/discussion of translations, though it's a pity it hasn't an archive). If the box is faulty (e.g. wrong language or out of date), fix it, like we do with everything else. I don't think we need to qualify that it's rough or an MT; those who don't speak the language don't care, and those that do would know that. Si Trew (talk) 06:28, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

Not English template
I've got a new proposition for the Not English template. I'd be happy to hear your opinions about it here. --rayukk &#124; talk 19:42, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

Is it OK to move one's own translations to cleanup?
Title says it all. We don't keep an archive here (do we?) so I guess it's all right, but for my own work I'd prefer that it got peer reviewed and the reviewer moved it (not some formal process, of course, just another set of eyes.) Si Trew (talk) 06:23, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

Draft:Le déclin de la télévision en faveur de la diffusion instantanée
Is there a tag to tag pages needing to move to a different language wikipedia, or a Deletion tag for this? -- 70.51.44.60 (talk) 04:41, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Templates for adding articles to this page
Just a thought, for the templates that list articles here, what if they used Template:Pagelinks so as to also provide, history, talk & edit links?-- Jac 16888 Talk 13:10, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
 * I think that would be very helpful. AtHomeIn神戸 (talk) 01:08, 21 December 2015 (UTC)