Meta:Babel

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A comparison between the bloat of mass messages and actual project discussions.

I have the feeling that this is incrementally worse. Every team wants every message to be delivered to every project's chat. This mass messages creates 0 engagement, and it's causing actual discussions to be buried. Any thoughts? Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 15:28, 11 August 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Ignacio Rodríguez projects can direct those things elsewhere if they want. They are almost always delivered to a list, so a project can make a special pump for "annoucements", or redirect things like technical notices to a technical pump (like how these 74 projects have a technical pump: wikidata:Q4582194). — xaosflux ^Talk 15:33, 11 August 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Not every community, specially the smaller ones, has the knowledge or time to make those adjustments. There must be a better way instead of mindlessly flooding every pump with bloat Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 16:19, 11 August 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I'm sensitive to this concern: in my previous role as a Movement Strategy and Governance (MSG) facilitator, I sent out a fair number of these mass messages to the places listed at Distribution list/Global message delivery. I noticed they did tend to pile up on the venues, and did fear this might discourage local users from creating other threads (or drown out threads) specific to those projects with sheer volume. I'm wondering how you've reached the conclusion that they create zero engagement though. How can you be sure no one is reading, clicking through, engaging here on Meta-Wiki, signing up for the events, voting on the topics, etc.? As a counter-point: most of the messages sent by MSG invite readers with a link to translate the original message into their language ({{int:please-translate}}), and there are a non-zero number of additional translations later submitted as a result. To me, this is at least a minor indicator that engagement is being generated, even if there's not many responses made directly on the village pumps. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 17:38, 11 August 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I'm sorry if I offended you. The 0 part is definitively an exaggeration. What I meant is that the "project village pump" purpose is to discuss issues pertaining the project, and the mass messages doesn't (mostly) contribute to that. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 15:31, 13 August 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

No offense taken! I'm glad that folks are thinking about this. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 19:24, 13 August 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I have become concerned about this as well (as I have found entire small projects missing from GMD and have been adding them). However I don't have any easy answers to offer. Certain things like elections and major policy changes need to be sent out. Perhaps we need to encourage more selective use of the GMD function, as well as some automated archiving of old messages. (Also see phab:T313672 which I suspect is related). --Rschen7754 18:05, 11 August 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I too feel like this is a problem. On Incubator I have created a separate page for such messages years ago, incubator:Incubator:Wikimedia news, distinct from the Community Portal which hosts discussions. I think this works well and I can only encourage every community that prefers to keep things separate to do so in this way. It's not like the global messages are irrelevant, just that local discussions tend to disappear, especially when they are "low volume" due to the community being small. --MF-W 14:36, 1 September 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Comment If anyone is interested: we have decided to move all global message to a subpage within our main pump. s:es:Wikisource:Café/Noticias_Wikimedia. It seems to be a fair compromise. Maybe it can be the default way to treat small projects :) Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 20:04, 27 September 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• Support ban on mass messaging Having a ban communicates that the messaging is inappropriate, and that mass messages should be exceptional and not routine. The effect of mass messages is the death of community discussion. Mass messages have spoiled the public commons and community space for marginal benefits mostly to the funded interests of the Wikimedia Foundation. For any community member to be heard, they have to compete against paid staff and paid projects for attention. The discussion boards were established for and by community, but this is not how they are currently used in 90% of community forums. It makes no sense to have 1000 local conversations of 10 people each to decide what to do when the problem originates at the top. Turning off the tap of mass messaging would prevent the flood. Almost everyone who is sending mass messages is engaged in unethical behavior to the detriment of the Wikimedia Movement. All can be forgiven for ignorance, but more awareness is needed for the problem.

A potential solution: the Wikimedia Foundation funds a project to establish messaging rules. We set a limit on how many messages go out per year, allocate quotas to different groups, then that is the limit on messages. Meta Wiki is not a social media platform, it cannot host messages without limit, and the current system unfairly favors anyone with money to post more messages. Bluerasberry (talk) 14:37, 28 September 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• The "MassMessage graveyards" are a serious problem, choking out any possibility of local discussions, which has been even pushing projects to offwiki forums to escape them. I think that each village pump should be checked for what percentage of sections are MassMessages, and for each one where local posts make up the minority of sections, the following actions should be taken:
  • The page should be removed from the distribution list.
  • An edit should be made to the page, removing or archiving all MassMessages (excluding those with responses). The removal edit would, in the edit summary, link to a page on Meta describing the situation, and explaining how to re-add the page to the distribution lists if desired, and how to set up a separate page on the project specifically for receiving MassMessages.
  • Further use of the MassMessage tool on the remaining fora should be restricted to particular cases, subject to review on Meta, and given a distinct "budget" (or at least, an aspirational goal for how low the level should be kept) for the various kinds of messages needed.
• --Yair rand (talk) 22:16, 6 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • But on the other side, cutting off projects from hearing about important global policy proposals is problematic. --Rschen7754 01:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

    Could the global policy changes be limited to once per year? Wakelamp (talk) 14:08, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

    @Wakelamp, do you really think people will prefer a single 100-page-long announcement to 200 smaller ones scattered throughout the year? At least with the shorter ones, it's easy to glance at it and decide whether you're personally interested. Also, you won't discover that you need to reply to 50 proposals in a single month, and have no information in the other 11 months.

    You can read about some prior discussions along these lines in phab:T130602. The specific task is closed, but the subject is still open for discussion. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:00, 10 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

    Thank-you for the link Doh I thought they were talking about WMF created notices.

    "you won't discover that you need to reply to 50 proposals in a single month, and have no information in the other 11 months" You should see my full list (when it is done!)

    I have been looking at a few smaller wikis; there is little discussion or their pumps (so WMF are proposals are unlikely to be read), few articles are being created (sports, political leaders, local tv shows,entertainers,...) except by autotranslation (old versions of en articles that were auto translated, that have never been manually edited), few active editors,

    (And I am here because of my interest in mass messages , but also because of my interest in the affect of autotranslation on connectivity and community) Wakelamp (talk) 16:56, 11 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

    A good deal of MassMessage postings are from the WMF. See, e.g., VisualEditor/Newsletter/2022/August for the last one that I caused to be inflicted on about a thousand pages. Qgil-WMF and his team have been encouraging the use of very short announcements, and I have been trying out that style. I think it helps reduce the amount of space taken up by announcements, but it doesn't address the problem of local people not using the wikis for communication. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:19, 11 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

    I like the idea of short comms. (Can you send unexpanded mass messages?)

    With local people not using wiki for comms, are they communicating but not on on wiki? Non-wiki comms is becoming common on en wiki. I am not sure whether it is because of privacy/revealing of true identity/more features than talk

    Your comment " caused to be inflicted on about a thousand pages" made me realize thatyou really really don't like spam :-). Although my friend J , may dislike spam just a smidgin more than you. He became very very annoyed by spam on day ..... it was 1982 and he was receiving one piece a day ..so he did his PhD on using Bayesian filters for spam id, and he has spent his whole career on spam. Wakelamp (talk) 16:09, 12 November 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

    Off-wiki communications seem to be driven partly by the difficulty of communicating on wiki (see mw:Talk pages consultation 2019; some of it's technical and some of it's not), plus that's where people already are. If you learn that "anyone can edit" on Facebook, or in a Whatsapp discussion with your friends from school, or on Slack at work, then you're likely to go back to that place to ask your questions. I live on the wikis, so this seems weird to me, but for someone who lives on Facebook, it probably seems like the most natural thing in the world.

    By the way, most of the English Wikipedia's early decisions were made off wiki, too. The idea that only on-wiki discussions "counted" took more than five years to take hold, and some of those original off-wiki discussion forums are still active today. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:54, 13 November 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• Village pumps, or a selected alternate forum, are there for the exact purpose of receiving the communications of the broader Wikimedia. If those forums are getting too long, then how about we look to bot archive the respective forums, so we are simply clean up after ourselves.  — billinghurst sDrewth 10:14, 11 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  @Billinghurst, a bot is nice, but it's pretty significant overhead to maintain. I have wondered whether a sort of fake "auto-archiving" system would work better. Can redirects be combined with parser functions? Imagine that the page is currently titled Project:Village pump now, and I want it to become Project:Village pump 2022, to be followed by Project:Village pump 2023, etc. Could the undated page title be redirected to something like #REDIRECT[[Project:Village pump {{CURRENTYEAR}}]]?

  (Imagine if we'd done something like this to w:en:WP:ANI years ago. It wouldn't have accumulated 1.2 million edits, and instead we'd "only" have 75,000 per year – something that various stats tools can realistically process.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:27, 11 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  The problem isn't the lack of an archive procedure. The problem is that the small amount of actual on-wiki discussion is buried within mass messages. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 17:42, 14 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  @Ignacio Rodríguez: The small number of edits is due to the small number of participants, not the number of posts on a page. Keeping the pages active, the posts relevant, and the pages readable (short enough) is about meeting the balance. We still want small communities to know what is happening and to participate.  — billinghurst sDrewth 12:53, 15 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  You're not thinking with the perspective of a small wiki participant. Many people contribute every couple of weeks and check the village pump rarely. We may have one or two discussion every month, and months can go by without anyone posting anything there. Every time they enter there they only see the weekly tech newsletter intercalated with miscellaneous Wikimedia stuff (half of the time in English and not their native language), and buried within there's the real talk (e.g. my screenshot above). That's not a welcoming environment and it's not encouraging discussion and engagement. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 23:13, 15 October 2022 (UTC) PS: my preferred solution is what we did at esWS, to have a separate pump for "interwiki" mass messages. Of course if someone is decent enough to write to us directly they can use our main pump.Reply[reply]

  I am participate in a range of wikis small to large, and I don't think that this is a single, simple issue. It appears evident that there are too many messages being poked to VPs and remaining in VPs, so overwhelming local conversation. I do not agree that by default they are the wrong place to be, as soon as you put them somewhere non-evident they become absolutely pointless in being delivered as no one will see them at a local wiki. So a better screening process by WMF of what they distribute, and can they relook at criteria used, allwikis, all langauges, sisterwikis, etc., a means to clean up, clear instruction on how a community can intervene.  — billinghurst sDrewth 08:35, 21 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  I agree that an intermediate solution can be that MassMessages come with a default "auto archive date" that's shorter than the default. And messages that involve dates should auto archive shortly past that date. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 14:53, 21 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  You can't auto-archive if there's no archive bot, which is the case for nearly all of the wikis, except for the very biggest ones. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:31, 24 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  @Whatamidoing (WMF) Given that archiving is a very necessary component of Village Pumps, and not every (minor) community have the technical knowledge to implement an archive bot, the WMF should offer archive bot for every project. this works very well, and it's easy to setup. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 20:18, 24 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  Have you ever looked at the French Wikipedia's main village pump? I suggest clicking the edit button and looking at the code. Basically, they have a separate village pump page for each day. The result is that it is auto-archiving, without needing anyone to set up or maintain a bot.

  I think that having a separate page for every day would be overkill on small wikis, but a separate page for each month or year would be very easy. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:33, 25 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  Another thing: MassMessages should include a direct link to the distribution list used to reach the community, so we can setup more accurately where should we organize those messages. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 15:20, 17 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  Definitely agree about the clear reference to understanding about the message, though I think that there is a better means than to the distribution list, it would be better to have an informed landing page that gives full information about the purpose of what is being attempted AND then how to push to another page.  — billinghurst sDrewth 08:35, 21 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  @Ignacio Rodríguez, every section posted by Special:MassMessage has an automatic and mandatory link to the distribution hidden at the end. If you click the [edit] button for the section, you'll see a line at the end that says something like

  There might additionally be a visible link to the distribution list (e.g., VisualEditor/Newsletter), but you can always find the distribution list. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:31, 24 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  Overall, it sounds like we have identified two separate problems:

  1. The pages get too big, so nobody wants to read them.
  2. The pages are full of announcements, so nobody wants to use them for anything else.

  The first problem can be solved by bot (archive when the page gets too big) or by using different pages for different years (the page will be empty in January and big in December, but never as big as many are now). If we wanted to take the bot approach, then an update to the Global bot policy would help.

  The second problem could be solved by having two different pages for the two different purposes, e.g., Village pump (announcements) and Village pump (discussion). Some wikis already do this.

  @Sj, I recall that you were interested in small wikis. Do you have any advice or other options you think worth considering? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:40, 24 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  Hi WhatareUdoing I'd definitely go with a separate announcements page! And a single "announcements summary" section in the general VP that gets a single line per announcement and is archived each ~year (Serving as a sort of "announcements calendar" since people do like to quickly scan past announcements) –SJ talk  03:21, 25 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  Sj, having a one-line summary would require people to remember to write that extra line, unless the ==Section heading== is used. But I think the rest is feasible. There's just a certain amount of work needed to make it happen (translate the title, update the typical distribution lists, add local links...) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:35, 25 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  Any community having this issue can already just do this today by changing their subscription page...what am I missing here? — xaosflux ^Talk 14:03, 13 November 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  @Xaosflux 1. There is no straightforward way to do it. There are several distribution lists, and not every community has the same technical skills, or even discussions (it can be an issue to those communities even if they don't talk about it). 2. It is a problem that can be adressed at the community level, but also at a central level. 3. You are not missing anything. The purpose of this thread was to gather thoughts about this problem. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 17:54, 13 November 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  I think the problem is it’s not obvious what the “standard” solution is. yuewiki has recently moved our subscription to a separate page (I did not participate in the discussions, being new on that wiki at the time and I hadn’t been active in any case), but only after investigating how several other wikis were tackling the problem before concluding that creating a separate page wasn’t a “totally out there” idea (and then there was the question of what the new page should be called).

  The fact that an investigation needed to be done shows that “X can already just do this today by Y” was not perceived to be obvious or straightforward. — Al12si (talk) 05:06, 13 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  THANK YOU Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 19:43, 13 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I find the page Open Culture/GLAM Glossary is too large. Do you see a way to lighten it? Splitting it with one page per initial letter is probably not a better accessibility. What do you think? -- Pols12 (talk) 14:27, 26 November 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Hi :) We took this glossary as a "template".Sintegrity (talk) 21:32, 26 November 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Hi! The page was really too big 😅. As the ideia is being a collaborative work, we hope it grows along time. So we broke the Glossary by letters, as you suggested. Could you please take a look and see if we did it in the proper way? Sintegrity (talk) 23:46, 10 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Given no one else answered here, I wanted to go forward marking the page for translation, but I see it was being splitted. That seems be better now, thank you! I’m marking the pages for translations. -- Pols12 (talk) 14:37, 11 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Sintegrity, in H page, I have turned the Wikipedia link list as vertical. Can you review it to consider apply this change to other pages? Also, if those links only come from Wikidata linked item, we should generate them automatically: that would simplify the code and ever keep the list up-to-date. -- Pols12 (talk) 19:15, 11 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Hi ! I understand the idea of a link list as vertical, but sometimes it would be really longer. See Copyright Open Culture/GLAM Glossary/C. Yeah the links to wikipedias come only from Wikidata. Could you help with the automation? Thanks Sintegrity (talk) 20:27, 11 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Just out of curiosity, on the home page, I changed my language to zh-hant to see how things would look like. I was stunned: almost 100% of the page was wrong.

So I pressed Translate and tried switching to zh-hant and was told (in Chinese) “zh-hant is no longer in use; please translate to zh”.

I switched back to zh and looked at the first string. To translate it properly I’d essentially have to break the entire string into two giant switches, one for zh-hans and one for zh-hant; to do anything else would create a huge mess.

The same is true for almost every other string.

So my question is: if doing zh-hant is now so difficult (thus discouraging people from doing zh-hant translation), why has direct translation into zh-hant no longer an option? This looks like someone wanted to promote a particular political agenda on Meta by wiping out zh-hant content (which really would be zh-tw content, since zh-hk “reader-writers” could get by with yue). — Al12si (talk) 11:45, 8 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

PS: The switches don’t even work. Everything is in zh-hans even though UI language is set to zh-hant. This is a disaster. Al12si (talk) 12:08, 8 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

It seems that there is a larger project looking at zh-* variants; see phab:T286291. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:58, 8 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Thanks for the pointer. This is unfortunate. zh-hant and zh-hans (which really is zh-cn) should never have been merged. —Al12si (talk) 12:13, 9 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Al12si You may want to see why zh-hant translations are disabled at mw:User_talk:Cwlin0416#Re: Can i request to add language Traditional Chinese (zh-hant)?. Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 08:23, 19 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

October and November 2022 education newsletter released for translation. Please help our readers to read education newsletter in their native language. The October education newsletter is for translation: here Newsletter headlines link for translation: here (please translate by December 08, 2022) Individual articles for translation: Category:Education/Newsletter/October 2022, and the November education newsletter is here Newsletter headlines link for translation: here (please translate by December 08, 2022) Individual articles for translation: Category:Education/Newsletter/November 2022. Regards, ZI Jony ^(Talk) 18:45, 8 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I don’t know if I should ask this here or over at Babylon, or in a PM, or somewhere else; but I guess this is sort of about policy (though probably not exactly Meta policy, though CWS is on Meta), so I suppose asking here probably makes some sense.

I saw the CWS announcement today and was very confused: it’s like 82% in English (or 93%, or some other number, depending on how you count). I thought I missed a translation announcement so I went to the CWS page to look for the letter, but it’s not there. So someone just wrote something that’s like 6% (18%) in the target language and asked people to translate it after the fact.

I don’t know what to think of this. I suppose Wikimedia staff have access to a standard set of openings and closings in all languages and just used them; but to me a message that opens with “Please translate this into your language” and remains 82% in English just looks like an error, and I’d assume most people who see it would also feel this looks like an error.

I suppose I want to ask again: what exactly is the point of translator signups? The post right before this one is literally “please translate x”, and throughout the few months since I signed up I got exactly one trasnation notice, and it wasn’t some high priority thing like the CWS.

Thanks for any clarifications.

PS: Sorry again if this isn’t the right place to ask, but this is what we get for having two forums and a lot of the discussion that should be happening probably falls into the grey area between the two. — Al12si (talk) 19:23, 13 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Re: the "Notify translators" alerting system, I believe it got complaints when it was used too much in previous years, plus felt like overkill when used many times each day (given it's available for every translatable page, or even every massmessage), as it sends 1,000+ talkpage messages plus more email messages (depending on user-prefs). I believe almost everyone stopped using it because of those reasons. I also vaguely-remember it being broken for a number of years, which would also have led to disuse. For my team, the current de facto method of communicating about priority translations is the translators-l@ mailing list. I hope that helps (provide some context, at least). Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:22, 19 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Where do you suggest that an abbreviation for a Wiki be simplified?

Right now the prefix for Crimean Tatar Wikipedia is crh. I would like to suggest switching to qt which is both unused and more appropriate since the name of the language is qırımtatar tili while crh isn't very direct or obvious as an abbreviation.--PlanespotterA320 (talk) 22:56, 17 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

They follow an international standard … start at Language codes  — billinghurst sDrewth 02:19, 18 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]