iNaturalist Leaving Translatewiki

It's possible some folks have ideological problems with wikis, but the complaints we've heard offline about assigning proofreaders are more practical, e.g. the ones I tried to describe at https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Thread:Support/designated_proofreaders,_excluding_locales.

Kueda (talk)19:37, 17 September 2019

I understand, but as I said "our suggestion is to give it a try and avoid overthinking things beforehand". If people were making changes like vs. Usted outside translatewiki.net, i.e. without communicating with other translators, that's not a problem with the platform but a social problem. I don't see anything on translating:iNaturalist warning translators to use "Usted", for instance.

Another example: at times your commits resulted in User:FuzzyBot seemingly edit warring with users [1] [2] who appear to have registered just to translate iNaturalist (so iNaturalist translators?). No wonder it was hard for the es-mx locale to coordinate, when translation edits were flying in all directions unexplained.

This social problem of lack of communication can be nudged towards a fix by eliminating the alternative platforms and forcing everyone to translate on translatewiki.net. Translators would then discover that we offer tools to quickly solve such issues of consistency, like Special:SearchTranslations, as well as effective communication methods like edit summaries, talk pages and so on.

It seems to me that you've not yet really tried to use translatewiki.net, so it's no surprise that the results have been unsatisfactory. I would suggest to give it a try for real, for instance with a trial of 3-6 months. If the communication/coordination problems continue to be so pressing, then they can be acted on (as opposed to letting them stew for 18 months or so without any sign to the community of translators).

Nemo (talk)20:05, 17 September 2019

Just to be clear, we've made our decision, so while I appreciate the suggestion to engage more thoroughly with Translatewiki's tools as a way to address our problems, we have already decided not to. I started this thread to notify you, to thank you, to ask how best to attribute you and all the translators, and to answer any questions you might have.

Also, we have not had alternative translation platforms for the web since we started collaborating with Translatewiki (we have used Crowdin for the mobile apps, but only started using Crowdin for the web today). Our partners in Mexico had been using Translatewiki, and ultimately they got tired of the constant negotiation and asked us to stop accepting new es-MX translations from Translatewiki. Changes like the one you cited were me over-writing es-MX changes from Translatewiki by copying over that file with the copy from master, not the result of an alternative translation system. My apologies to TW translators that have been left in the lurch by doing so.

Kueda (talk)21:10, 17 September 2019

We wish you the best in your future endeavours. Thank you for your use of translatewiki.net in the past, and thank you for explaining why you're leaving.

Siebrand22:50, 17 September 2019