Wikipedia:Translation/Overhaul

What was the problem?

Wikipedia's old translation system, the remnants of which can be found in Category:Deprecated translation system, was a mess. A few of its problems:

• It spawned thousands of unused translation subpages. These were difficult to update, so they generally were never updated.
• Requests were untrackable. Since most translation subpages were not updated, years-old translation requests became stale as the English Wikipedia was updated independently. Moreover, some requests were never even properly formed at all. Often people would paste (untrackable) translation templates on various project pages. In addition, most of the time these requests were never linked to our existing article pages.
• Its bureaucracy was nearly impenetrable. Newly registered users and unregistered users, many of whom might be able to contribute translations as an easy first task, would have been unable to participate.
• The project was invisible. Some talk page tags were applied, but not many. People who did not specifically seek out WP:TRANSLATION would be unaware of the need for translations.

Besides the main translation project, there were further problems:

• We had (and have) nearly two dozen translation projects by topic, which are not coordinated with the main translation system.
• We also have various inactive language-based collaborations like Wikipedia:French Collaboration Project and various user-written how-tos like Wikipedia:About translating German Wikipedia, none of which are connected.
• Furthermore, there were two related projects (or maybe one, their relationship was unclear) focusing on encouraging translation of foreign-language featured articles: Wikipedia:Featured articles in other languages and Wikipedia:WikiProject Echo. These projects seem to have indiscriminately placed translation requests on every en.wiki article with a foreign-language FA counterpart, without regard to whether the foreign language article is actually superior to our own.

The vision

Imagine Wikipedia with....

• One integrated translation system, where there is a single way to list desired translations so that they attract the attention of those most likely to translate
• Translation requests that are valid, rather than ones that are useless (i.e. no requested translations of inferior foreign-language articles)
• A way to manage translations so that even casual users can contribute translations
• Licensing compliance for translated articles
• A page for each major language with a collaboration area, resources for translation, and links to articles needing translation
• Contributors who are aware of Wikipedia's translation efforts
• Coordination with topic- and language-based wikiprojects so efforts are not duplicated

There are thousands of articles worthy of translation on non-English Wikipedia. If Wikipedia's multilingual contributors were organized, the international scope of English Wikipedia could be expanded greatly.

What has been done so far?

• New {{Expand language}} tags like {{Expand Spanish}} have been created. These make tracking and requesting translations much easier. They may be placed on article pages or on talk pages, at editors' discretion. These tags also have links to machine translations, so that untranslated text may be of use to monolingual Wikipedians.
• A bot task has been coded so the corresponding article links are added to all {{Expand language}} translation requests.
• All translation requests from the old system were reviewed. Where the request appeared invalid (e.g. from 2005 and the en.wiki article was now quite good, or if it was previously translated), it was not acted on. (If an translation template was on the article's talk page, and the request was invalid, the template was removed.) If the request was valid, an {{Expand language}} was added to the article page or the article talk page. Some valid requests had no corresponding en.wiki articles. For these, a stub was created, and a tag was applied to the stub. Where this was not possible, relevant WikiProjects were notified of the remaining translation requests.
• Many stale translation pages have been redirected and merged toward WP:TRANSLATE.
• {{WikiProject Echo}} template uses converted to new {{Expand language}} templates on many valid translation requests, then the template was deleted when it became clear that its application was haphazard.

What is left to do?

• Coordinate Category:Translation projects by topic with the main system. This may require adding another parameter to {{Expand language}}, so that wikiprojects can tag and track translations of interest without maintaining separate lists. Another idea is to have a bot-generated list for each wikiproject alerting them to articles tagged with their banner that are in need of translation. (Bot request pending.)
• Create pages like Wikipedia:Translation/Spanish and Wikipedia:Translation/German for major languages, so that there is a centralized forum for translation questions, a venue for collaboration, and resources for translations.
• Figure out what to do with Wikipedia:Translators available. Should this be merged to language-specific translation pages like Wikipedia:Translation/German?
• Clean up Category:Wikipedia translation templates. Specifically, roughtranslation and cleanup-translation are not very helpful as is. They do not distinguish between mere copyediting needs and needs for a fluent speaker to check the accuracy of the translation. In any event, the latter category should be sorted by language to be useful.
• Review Category:Articles in translation, Category:Wikipedia articles needing cleanup after translation, and Category:Rough translations to update their status.
• Notify identified translators and regional WikiProjects of these changes, encouraging them to contribute and asking about coordination.