Wikipedia talk:Pages needing translation into English/Archive 6

Move them to draft?
Is there any reason these pages need to be in the mainspace? What would be lost if they were moved into the draft space or somewhere? Siuenti (talk) 11:32, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I took a look at the rules and according to WP:DRAFTIFY, the only reason applicable here is WP:Userfication. This in turn mentions several prerequisites, boiling down to "you can only userfy: things that are meant to be on a Wikipedian's user page, your own articles, and articles for which a deletion discussion results in userfication, except if they violate WP policies." --HyperGaruda (talk) 17:45, 18 May 2017 (UTC)
 * These things would appear to violate the WP policy that this is the English WP. Siuenti (씨유엔티) 01:02, 19 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Also you didn't answer either of my questions. Maybe a new policy or guideline would be useful here. Siuenti (씨유엔티) 01:04, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Siuenti (씨유엔티) 22:57, 19 May 2017 (UTC)


 * Not sure why I was pinged but I think leaving them in article space for two weeks is not only not harmful but indeed helpful since a reader stumbling upon it who knows the language might be able to provide a translation while they would probably never see it in Draft-space. Regards  So Why  06:42, 20 May 2017 (UTC)
 * You were pinged because you are the only person who appears to oppose this suggestion. You think leaving things which could contain anything at all, possibly violating policies and guidelines including use English, WP:V, WP:N, WP:NOT, copyright laws, libel laws and goddamn WP:Humor in article space for two weeks is "not harmful but indeed helpful". Siuenti (씨유엔티) 08:15, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

Machine-translations....
We had a bold attempt to rewrite WP:TRANSLATION; I'd rather have some regulars comment on that. Please see the talk-page of said page. Lectonar (talk) 21:45, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Stumbled upon this on It-Wikipedia....a speedy deletion tag which kind of expands our A2 here: "(C3) Pagina scritta in un'altra lingua o tradotta con traduttori automatici" which is "....page written in another language or translated by machine translation...". You think we should try to expand ours too, or is this actually perennial? Lectonar (talk) 12:00, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

330 MT articles by a user
I've created a subpage /Annex 1 listing the 300 hundred-odd machine-translated articles by a user who already appears on the main page with several dozen articles in two chunks. I'm not sure what to do with this list, so I've created it here for now as a Talk page subpage, following my understanding of WP:SUBPAGE recommendations.

Do we want to migrate some of this stuff to the main page, just leave it here, reformat the list and add it to Administrators' noticeboard/CXT/Pages to review, or something else? Mathglot (talk) 06:02, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I'd say add it to the admin noticeboard list; much more eyes on it there, and works seems to progress unusually fast. Lectonar (talk) 08:32, 19 April 2017 (UTC)


 * Am certainly willing and happy to do that. In addition, since the  was in a format that is closer to that of the Administrators' noticeboard/CXT/Pages to review page, with a fairly simple regex tweak it would be easy to adjust the format to match that page, and be good to go.  Just want to make sure there is consensus for this, and I guess I should check with some of the people over there as well about it, before dumping more work onto their plate, as it were.   has been the prime-mover over there, so let's see what he says, first, but would also like more PNT-ers to weigh in here as well.  Worst case, the appendix just sits here for a while, till we figure out what's what.  Mathglot (talk) 20:03, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I think we need the WP:AN discussion to be closed now. Once it's closed, we'll have appropriate procedures available to us and we can decide which should apply.  I feel as if this is in limbo until that happens.— S Marshall  T/C 20:16, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Makes sense to me.  can you please link specifically which WP:AN discussion you mean, so we know what we're pending on?  I don't think you mean any of the ones at WP:AN/CXT which are mostly closed, or about gadgets and things. Mathglot (talk) 06:06, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I mean the X2 one, which was recently closed. I've just seen that we can't apply X2 to these articles because they aren't on the list of 3,602 articles that X2 applies to.  Let's do the X2 work, formally retire X2, and then consider whether to seek consensus for a more general speedy deletion criterion that we could apply to any article.— S Marshall  T/C 16:05, 23 April 2017 (UTC)
 * If they are junk, speedily move them to draft and decline is my opinion... not sure what would say though. Siuenti (씨유엔티) 00:26, 26 May 2017 (UTC)


 * You can't just speedily move them to draft without examining them first. Of the languages I can verify, they most certainly were junk when first created by this user, but in some cases other users have come in afterward and edited them or even expanded them, until some are suitable for the encyclopedia.  So no wholesale move is possible; you have to look at them one by one.  I did leave the user in question a note on their talk page about whether they were really fluent in 17 languages, and as of that date, new-page creation by that user using the cxt tool has stopped. Mathglot (talk) 22:43, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm thinking of trying to establish a way for people to find "drafts" in languages in which they are competent, so they can help them if they want and hopefully make them suitable for the encyclopedia. If I do that will you be happier moving at least the junk ones to draft? Or prodding the junk and drafting the "not junk but not ready for main space" ones? I'd like to point out that if you can't read something at all, even with the help of an online translator, it could anything whatever, policy-compliant or not, legal or not, funny or not, and should be treated with extreme care. Siuenti (씨유엔티) 13:53, 4 June 2017 (UTC)


 * Regarding moving the junk ones to draft, per S Marshall's response first things first, pretty much. Also, various people (including myself) floated the idea of just draftifying the entire WP:CXT/PTR list during the discussions about X2 and how to handle it but that didn't fly, for reasons which I came to agree with. I suspect that another discussion about draftifying these 330 would come to the same conclusion, but you never know, so you could open that discussion. In a couple of cases at CXT/PTR, I unilaterally moved a page in danger of X2 deletion to a user draft because I could see from the rev history that someone had spent a lot of time on it, and I didn't want them to be discouraged to see it pulled out from under them, so you could always try that. As far as prod'ing and/or Afding, you don't need to wait for anybody else's accord, and if you prodded all 330 of them, I couldn't be happier, although in reality to be fair you'd have to spend a few moments on each one to make sure it still deserved it, because some of them are since much improved. As far as your last sentence: sure, but that's already true with articles in main space, so this isn't some kind of special case deserving special attention in that sense.  I fairly recently tagged an article that has been copyvio since 2006.


 * Regarding finding drafts in languages you're competent in: I suspect that won't be easy. You might be able to create or request a database query that returns lists of users that create a lot of drafts, of which some number have the ContentTranslation tag in them. Or possibly, users that create drafts that belong to any one of the categories  Mathglot (talk) 03:58, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

{od}OK let me try to come up with a plan: if it's in a language you can read or google translate, and it's not junk, post it at WP:PNT. If you can read it and it's junk, prod it and put it in a language category like "pages needing translation from Cro-Magnon". Someone may fix it and remove the tag, if not it's no loss to the project. If you can't read it or google translate it, it's potentially illegal, at least get it out of mainspace into drafts. We'll make a category for language unknown, and list it at WP:PNT to see if someone can deal with it - maybe give it a month. Any thoughts? Siuenti (씨유엔티) 06:32, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

er, don't we already do that for NOTENGLISH? leave them up for a month then delete? My *main* question though is if I come along in my innocence and wish to improve some bad translations, I am not sure where that proposal would have me look. It sounds like they are all in one category but we code a language if we think it's junk? What? Why would we not do that in the first place? It's like why do we not screen translation tickets for notability *first*? And why does Poot get to keep churning out bad articles? Elinruby (talk) 00:30, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
 * do you think we could agree on quality criteria for translation? Elinruby (talk) 00:33, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

Mireille Issa - worth the trouble?
A lot of WP:Effort at WP:Pages needing translation went into the article Mireille Issa, a borderline notable(?) academic currently at AfD here. It was Prodded and deleted, but could and should it have been saved?

My point is that if it couldn't be saved, WP:PNT wasted a lot of time on it, valuable time which could have been spent translating French featured articles, checking references in French, fighting bias against Francophone parts of the the developing world etc. The first person who saw it and realized it was borderline could have "incubated" it out of mainspace, and then anyone else who wanted to could have examined it at leisure. Siuenti (씨유엔티) 05:38, 30 May 2017 (UTC)
 * It was WP:PRODded and deleted (at 01:46, 18 April 2017), yes; but it later restored at 22:16, 6 May 2017 by per WP:REFUND. There is now an ongoing deletion discussion (which as you note is at Articles for deletion/Mireille Issa), but it is not yet closed. Discussion about whether it should be saved now belongs on that AfD. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 09:42, 30 May 2017 (UTC)
 * This is not about what to do with that particular article, it's about what to do with other borderline cases that come along. If it was worth saving one via the (extremely labour intensive) normal procedure, maybe the normal procedure is fine. Siuenti (씨유엔티) 11:14, 30 May 2017 (UTC)


 * , is this RfC about the lady herself, or is it about something else, like whether PNT should have to deal with less notable figures? I don't understand what I am supposed to !vote upon. Thanks,  d.g. L3X1  (distænt write)   )evidence(  12:47, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
 * If you think that article should be kept, I will infer that the current system at PNT may be working for borderline cases. If not, I will infer the system should be changed to "incubating" borderline cases. If you want to explicitly tell me incubate/don't incubate borderline cases I'd also be happy to hear it. Siuenti (씨유엔티) 15:06, 31 May 2017 (UTC)


 * I think I can shed some light, since I am pretty sure I am the one that wasted the time, although in this case with my eyes open. But this is a pet peeve of mine and I have already ranted extensively on the subject. I am not sure what 's question was exactly, but the idea I was playing with when I did the work on Mireille Issa was whether it was even possible to establish notability in a field as arcane as late Roman/early medieval history -- assuming I am remembering the right article. There aren't going to be a lot of citations simply because there aren't a lot of people in the field. I knew when I was looking at that that it was being questioned for notability and really don't care a lot about this particular article. The reason this RfC matters a lot to me is that I do a lot of work at WP:PNT and it really annoys me to spend time deciphering an article written in some sort of creole l33t pro bono only to be haughtily informed that association football players are not notable no matter how beloved. At least I think that is what it was; I frankly didn't care about the football player, but thought someone else might. So perhaps what Siuenti is asking is whether my time was treated disrespectfully. If so it was not, in this particular case, since it was an intellectual exercise and a straightforward BLP translation from a language I speak well. But s/he has imho touched upon a broader point I have been complaining about elsewhere -- in a world where we only have so many translators why not use them wisely? I would like to know that things I am asked to translate are not going to then be deleted, and in fact generally avoid all biographies now as a result of the experience I describe above. Then there is the notability process itself, which is rather ethnocentric, but that is a different rant Elinruby (talk) 07:45, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
 * This is exactly my point: currently PNT requests you to prioritize these pages, mostly of low to zero notability, and then is indifferent to whether they are even kept. I would like you to be able to choose things you think are worth keeping and spend your valuable time on those. Siuenti (씨유엔티) 12:26, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Well in theory we are always free to ignore given articles, but the process that brings them to PNT is fairly random and there should be screening for notability. Or, if notability can't be determined for a given article, because it's in another language, there should be a separate process to do this first. I was quite offended by the football article incident -- it was in a sort of Abidjan patois that is not the same dialect I learned to speak in Quebec, and I was quite proud of it, as a translation. In practice, if it's French or Portuguese and I don't do it it does not get done, and we do not have a native Spanish or Portuguese speaker at all. So it's not like there is no pressure to do articles that are uninteresting but look like they may be important to someone. I strongly urge that we come up with a more rational means of identifying and handling translated material. *Surely* en.wikipedia has people who would love to help. Elinruby (talk) 13:13, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
 * By the way, I am an involved editor, can you tell? LOL.
 * What I'm thinking as to a "rational process" is move everything to drafts, or somewhere, and categorize by language. Prod junk-looking ones. Slowly delete (1 month? 3 months?) borderline ones like Mireille Issa unless someone wants to rescue them. Keep actual good-quality ones (extremely rare I think) indefinitely until someone uses it or maybe gets transwikied. Siuenti (씨유엔티) 13:36, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
 * well when you say good, do you mean a good translation or a good article? At least for my languages, that's an important distinction. You can have a a beautiful translation of an article that does not meet the standards of en.wikipedia. I do like the idea of a draft place because what I always go through is new page patrollers AfDin things within seconds of hitting mainspace, whereas the article in the other doesn't have any references but you have four tabs open if they would let you put the citation in ... geez. You know? 00:15, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

From what I can grasp, I think it is a good idea to let lesser notable articles "rot" instead of prioritising them for translation. d.g. L3X1 (distænt write)   )evidence(  01:58, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
 * theoretically yes but in my experience most people think it's not notable unless they have heard of it. It's a problem for those of US who edit, say, Africa....Elinruby (talk) 05:12, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Hmm this might be a problem for WP:BIAS not WP:PNT. You don't find that if you write a decent article with not COI people trust you? Siuenti (씨유엔티)
 * No not really. I have repeatedly run into worldview problems on multiple topics. It's quite illuminating to have to explain to a new page patroller who only creates articles on cricket why an article on (let's say) Los Saicos or Leung Ping-kwan is important. (Although I have never been there exactly, but these are very different articles that I consider important, neither of which I created, neither of which presents any COI for me. I am mostly a wikignome. This is an example. But I have talked to a couple different iterations of that new page reviewer.) Or Kimberley Process. Or Petrobras. It's so systemic that really the only solution is to patiently explain, and and again. But I am ranting. Is this discussion about the larger issue or is it about Mireille Issa? If the later: She edits under her own name here and on fr.wikipedia. I question her grasp of the platform. I seem to recall I sent her a message, probably at fr.wikipedia, to the effect that en.wikipedia was wondering why it kept getting versions of her CV in French, and this was making people wonder if she had us confused with LinkedIn. I have gotten swept up in trying to address the larger issue and have not looked at this article since. I don't really care what happens to it. If it stays up at WP:PNT I may try again to do something with it, but when I looked at it before I didn't find enough to meet general notability, though she might meet the professor rule. Maybe, I think. Editing her own article is probably COI but hey she's open about it...who knows? Elinruby (talk) 22:17, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Different view' The issue is whether a person who might be notable in one very limited population is therefore notable to all populations covered by Wikipedia. This person appears notable only to Francophone Medievalists which is far too limited a group, in my opinion, to be "generally notable" for purposes of Wikipedia. If she were widely cited, that might weigh in her favour, but such, alas, appears not to be the case at hand. What we should consider more generally is whether extremely specialized experts, who are notable only in an extremely specialized or limited field, should be given articles. At this point, policy seems to deem then insufficiently notable, in my opinion. Collect (talk) 12:40, 11 June 2017 (UTC)
 * myeah maybe. I am not really arguing anything else. I do have a little problem with the idea that episodes of Pinky and the Brain are more notable than this lady's work. But she is not the point, at least not to me. I am busy rl and busy with other stuff in Wikipedia so you have my blessing to do whatever. And by the way she is probably an Arabic speaker who speaks some French because of the colonial history; the French language-stuff just is the only stuff I myself could get my hands around ;) But I do just want to say that this discussion reminds me of the time I was trying to explain to another editor that a given author was the author of BIND and therefore an expert on DNS and the person just wasn't having any of it because People magazine had never done an article. Sometimes a person *is* the authority, is all I am saying. Is that the case here? Dunno. Don't really care, actually. But that is my input on this example of my wikignoming that I did as an intellectual exercise in an idle moment, which we are discussing here. In the above instance eventually Wikipedia shut down for 24 hours because guess what, DNS is important whether people have heard of it or not. This Mireille Issa situation won't break the internet, but that is still my cautionary tale on the subject. Peace out people. Elinruby (talk) 21:59, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * So, the deletion discussion has been closed as no consensus. Rather not helpful. Should we DRV? I think the arguments for deleting were the stronger ones...on the other hand the close is well within admins discretion. Lectonar (talk) 18:22, 20 June 2017 (UTC)

Clearing the backlog and turbo-charging the project
I just had an idea how we could clear the backlog, turbo-charge this whole project, and maybe even encourage translations of vastly more articles than are reported here at present, maybe by a factor of ten or more.

Some of you are familiar with the X2 Review project to evaluate 3,600 machine-translated articles for possible deletion using the temporary speedy deletion criterion X2. That project was really hamstrung by a lack of available translators in Asian and other languages, and following a suggestion by, I started to recruit some translators for a couple of languages, and that seemed to work out okay as far as it went, but it was slow going.

In order to scale up, I created a whole, translation-management infrastructure involving recruiting translators in specific languages to participate, sending them invitations on their talk page with a few articles to evaluate or translate, and collating the results. It is currently built to handle 39 languages but could easily be expanded. I know a couple of you have seen the effects of it already, as you received one of our invitations to assess a translation. This whole infrastructure was designed as an adjunct or feeder pipeline for the X2 review project, to handle those among the 3,600 articles that were not getting any attention.

Now, the X2 review project is time-limited (in theory, it should have ended already), and when it's done, we'll have this whole infrastructure for managing translators and translations just sitting there. Now I think you see where I'm heading with this...

It would not be difficult to either morph, or clone this system, and tailor it for clearing our backlog in pretty much every language we see around here, including ones that get no attention currently. Beyond that, with proper tuning and some additional infrastructure, we could set up a pipeline to find good articles on other wikipedias, expose them here or at WP:TRANSLATION or somewhere, and invite translators to contribute. Instead of just having the "usual gang of idiots" slogging away at the backlog, we'd have an army devouring them.

The current infrastructure is here: WP:CXT/PTR/By language.

A fringe benefit of this infrastructure is that no bilingual knowledge is needed to use or manage it: I've been out there dealing with people who speak Chinese, Bengali, Gujarati, Romanian, Farsi and other languages, and I don't know any of those. So it's a natural fit for those who seem to want to help out with translation-related tasks, but don't necessarily have the requisite language skills.

Anyway, just thought I'd throw this out there. I enjoy WP:PNT the way it is, and I guess it could keep going this way pretty much forever and I'd be content, but I think it would be fun to light a rocket under it, and see what happens. What does everybody else think? Mathglot (talk) 07:18, 20 June 2017 (UTC)


 * Great Idea...I am just quick-reading the talk-pages archives (I posted something in 2006...how time flies), btw, to see if something like this was proposed before (not the translation-management infrastructure, of course), but just efforts to encourage more participation. I seem to remember there were, but everything petered out silently. Anyway, why don't we try it? Lectonar (talk) 07:32, 20 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I don't see a downside. Except perhaps that we should be careful not to come across as nagging people who have much bigger problems; the Turks come to mind. But I don't think this is much of a risk for friendly empathetic people. I am still preoccupied with family stuff btw, but I have a few hours today Elinruby (talk) 20:35, 20 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Oh, I agree, it's a volunteer project, after all. But a kindly worded invitation like the one we have is fine, I think; plus some of our translator-volunteers ask for more, unprompted.  Sure, the majority don't respond to the invitation, and we should just leave them alone, but there's no harm in asking once. In any case, it will have to wait until the X2 project is definitively closed, but there's no rush.
 * Lectonar, if you find that archived conversation, post a link; no sense reinventing the wheel if there's some good ideas there we can steal. Mathglot (talk) 00:24, 21 June 2017 (UTC)
 * much later -- I was wondering how hard it would be to turn this work into something like a subscriber RSS feed for given languages. You know, like Catalan for you if you chose to sign up, French for me...because we still need help with Spanish and especially Portuguese, but people seem to be willing to help if asked about specific articles. Elinruby (talk) 09:32, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
 * That seems like a worthwhile idea that deserves its own section, since it's quite different than this one. Not sure how hard it would be to implement, but you could ask.  Probably Village Pump WP:VPR or WP:VPI is the place to go. Mathglot (talk) 10:21, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
 * I don't see why there is so little effort to make the translation process much easier. Google Translate and Facebook readily solicit help. If an article exists in another language, it seems to me that there should be a presumption that it should exist in all other languages. I happened by a very short article in a non-English Wikipedia article that I felt I could easily translate to English. I wanted to cite it to English speakers, but when I saw there was no English version I thought maybe I should just contribute a translation myself as opposed to just translating it for my friends. I assumed there would be a simple button that would start the process. Why isn't there one? If someone could create an editor that would have the text to translate or even start with machine suggestions, that would be great. I realize that there can never be a 1:1 correspondence between articles in different languages. As soon as someone edits in one language, you will end up with significant divergence. But starting the process and enabling some sort of method for contributing to the process would enhance Wikipedia in a very fundamental way. 76.168.4.212 (talk) 21:53, 18 March 2018 (UTC)
 * We once had such a tool available to the general public, but it was misused to dump "translated" (machines still do a very bad job of translating) pages effortlessly onto en-wiki, thereby ruining the encyclopedia's quality. Ideally such machine-translated pages would get corrected over time through wiki's crowdsourcing, but the backlog here tells us that hardly happens. --HyperGaruda (talk) 05:50, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I dunno about "ruining the encyclopedia's quality" since many of the articles that were machine-translated were of actually quite good. But a handful of editors got MT happy and started using the tool for languages they didn't speak, with horrendous results. We're still digging out of it, what, a year later, and while in many cases the editor was correct in feeling that there should be an article, it isn't really useful to have articles where "Joan Miro" becomes "Joan Looked", because nobody can read them. Elinruby (talk) 19:47, 27 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Or worse, they can read them, and then they write a report for their middle school class, starting, "Joan Looked was a Spanish painter from Barcelona." And since they're just learning footnotes, they add one saying "Wikipedia said so." Mathglot (talk) 18:28, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

Proposal to mark CSD#X2 as historical
Hi, translators! Your comments are invited at Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion. As part of this discussion we will probably want to decide how to deal with raw machine translations in future (whether for example CSD#A2 can be expanded to include them?)— S Marshall T/C 19:52, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Now in WT:CSD/Archive 64#Proposal to mark X2 as historical. Mathglot (talk) 00:32, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Using template Rough translation for just a section
If you ever wanted to tag just a section, instead of a whole article, as Rough translation, there's a way. The template itself doesn't have a  param, like a lot of templates do (it wouldn't be that hard to add one) but in the meantime, there's a workaround you can use to get the same effect. It works by borrowing Ambox, which is usually just a meta-template invoked by other templates, but can also be used directly. It's easier to point to an example than to explain it, so if you want a Rough translation/section warning, you can go to and grab a copy. (I didn't bother including the small-print Duflu-addition instructions at the bottom, but you can copy that straight out of Rough translation if you want it.) HTH, Mathglot (talk) 00:28, 18 November 2017 (UTC)


 * Figured it was easier to just dump it here, so here goes:

Test section to be tagged for rough translation


 * The Rough translation template does have a  param, it's positional param 3. You can code   to tag a section in an article on en-wiki that is a rough translation from Spanish. Mathglot (talk) 07:20, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

Civil law articles, help needed - fr es and pt esp
The English language articles for topics like cassation and the Napoleonic Code could really use an examination since there seems to have been some confusion about the nomenclature. For example civil law is a legal system separate but equivalent to British common law, which has a criminal legal system as well as a civil law system, while civil law sorts these functions into private law and criminal and administrative law, etc. In any event, somebody has been translating civil as civilian in some of the above cases, adding further wrongness...Many countries such as Brazil have legal systems based on the Napoleonic Code, so this is probably a dozens of articles: help is invited. Especially need a Portuguese speaker for the ongoing corruption trials down there Elinruby (talk) 05:27, 2 January 2018 (UTC) Elinruby (talk) 05:27, 2 January 2018 (UTC)