Thread:Support/Language names not in Unicode CLDR/reply (22)

When you posted this initial thread the CLDR input period was still not open. I replied at that time and it was still not open. This is no longer the case, as now CLDR input has started again (but it currelty has some start problems with performance, so it's difficult to use when each input requires waiting for avout 20-30 seconds after each click or submission (otherwose the next clicks are handled asynchronously in the wrong order, or your clicks may be handled up to one minute later when the screen content has finally been changed and that click will go to another element than the one effectively clicked. For now, it's simply unusable for mass input. Additionnaly there are frequent losses of sessions.

These problems in the CLDR Survey are not new (it has always existed since so many years), but version after version it gets each time worse because the UI performs too many background requests, but also because it constantly reflows the content when all the page is in a giant table.

The CDLR Survey tool has not seriously been designed (and it is unusable without a very solid PC: even with higabytes of memory and an octo-core CPU, its javascripts are dramatically slow, even at non-peek hours, with less than a dozen users connected to it). It really lacks a good server (and probaly my own desktop PC is more powerful than the one used to host the CLDR survey).

So we cannot recommend many people to use it. It is simply more efficient to submit a bug report with the necessary data in XML format than using the online tool (and in fact most of the content of the CLDR has been submitted this way). The tool itelf is only uable for vetting a few items.

May be the Wikimedia Foundation could provide a grant to the CLDR project if we want to use it as a source. But for now, Wikiemdia projects should simply leave better by just providing the data itself, here on translatewiki.net, to perform most of the job needed for creating and vetting data, even if we submit it in XML format to the CLDR project where they will be merged and vetted in a later version. The CLDR project is very slow to accept new data, too much for us where we have more urgent needs (and my opinion is that our own community is larger and privides more fata with more quality than the very small communty on CLDR).

For now, the other "major" participants in CLDR (Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM) did not contribute with the necessary resources they should have given to CLDR to make it effective. In fact they also have their own internal development processes and submit data very passively to CLDR, where cooperation is in fact very poor (really Google could have provided the needed technical infrastructure of servers, and a few of its web designers, but apparently it is not really interested in providing more locales than about 30-50 for which most of the needed data is already in CLDR and the rest can remain in English for Google... Microsoft, Apple and IBM are apparently on the same path and don't care much about our desire in Wikimedia to support more languages).

Even if I've been member to the CLDR project and Unicode since years, I am still convinced that Translatewiki.net performs better than CLDR and provides more data, faster, in a more efficient way, with faster corrections of errors, faster delivery, and a much larger community of contributors and users.

However the CLDR project is still good for the technical aspect of specifications. But for collecting the data itself I cannot recommend it (and there are really a lot of errors in this data, that has been signaled years ago, and impossible to change year after year because of not enough votes, and the near impssibility to involve more people to participate in this Survey tool).

I son't say that the CDLR is not unneeded, but it should just be one (minor) source of data for Wikimedia projects (and for most other open projects, including Ubuntu and Launchpad). I propose to reverse the direction of interaction with CLDR, and for as long as this CLDR project will not scale better with serious technical resources and more serious involvement of Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Adobe, Oracle (and other large "official members" of CLDR TC).