Maintenance of page - adding new languages
Is there a log somewhere of newly supported languages added to translatewiki.net? Or another place to find out which languages have been recently added? I would like to be able to review the supported languages every few months, in order to be able to add new ones to this page.
Best check BetawikiSettings.php diffs and MediaWiki's Names.php diffs. I usually do not note newly supported languages on News, but I guess I should start doing that.
I have made a script that collects the codes of language Portal pages having a "/translators" subpage and the links to portal pages in Languages by language family. Comparing the two lists, it produces Lists of listed languages without translators (currently none) and languages not listed despite translators (currently: tcy, rtm, pnb, wbl, mwv, vep, ln, tsd, liv, tk, pcd, wym, lzz, za, lzh, nov, guc, fiu-vro, en, dlc, lus, sma, sli, tokipona, bo, rue, lez, pdt, krj, tw, or, udm, och, chb, yrl, dum, sei, xal, kgp, bat-smg, vls, jut, ha, sc, saz, ur, num, rgn, inh, ug, sxu, prg, rap, vot, sr, min, pa, nah, nan, lij, mnc, roa-tara, rmy, nv, en-gb, mrj, vmf, mzn, sa, zh-classical, kg, pdc, sh, sl, sg, se, sd) Don't take these verbatim, /translators subpages could be empty!
The script is written in the Python programming language and uses the pywikipediabot framework to access translatewiki.net. It's output is currently somewhat simplistic. There is a copy at User:Purodha/translatorlanguages.py if you want to run it yourself, or make it better. I could upload it into the pywikipedia svn, or make a web page on the toolserver that runs it and dynamically shows its output, or whatever else good ideas you have, just tell me what you like me to do.
Thank you very much for providing a working list of potential languages for addition to the language map; that's saved me some drudgery. I understand the first paragraph but the second paragraph is beyond me, I'm afraid. Thank you for the offer for me to run this myself, but I have no idea about software, do not have the time to learn about it, bearing in mind that this page is not important, and am likely to botch the job if I tried! If you wanted to give me a list like that in the first paragraph every three months or so, then that would save me work, which would be appreciated.
If you have had fun designing a script for this, then that is well and good. I have been spending some time on this page myself as a fun break from other things on translatewiki.net which require a lot more concentration. I think that we need to ask who, if anyone, would like to make use of this page, and for what purpose, before investing serious effort into the page.
That is partly why I asked the question about the inactive languages, because if this page is an illustration of the scope of translatewiki.net then it is not very helpful to include the inactive languages.
Yes, I had fun, slipping this in between much more complicated things, because it has been so easy and straightforward. I have made a slightly more sophisticated version and put it at User:Purodha/translatorlanguages.py again for anyone to use or read. I'll run the script every few months now and place the results here - no problem.
I suggest to simply make a note "(last activity: 2008-Dec-12)" or something similar next to the language name for those ones that are, say more than a year and a half without new translations, when new translations are pending for supported products. Would be nice if we could find a way to make them automagically disapear when activity comes back, but I've no idea how.
Thank you for the suggestion on notes on last activity. From my point of view, there will come a point where the amount of work needed to maintain the page will be more than the page is worth, which again raises the issue of how useful the page could be, and whether adding more detail will make it more useful still, or perhaps less useful if there is too much clutter. Time for a new thread I think.
Re-runnig the script produced these unlisted languages with listed translators:
- chb
- dlc
- dum
- hsn
- kg
- kgp
- krj
- lez
- lij
- lus
- mwv
- nan
- num
- nv
- och
- prg
- rap
- sei
- vmf
- wym
- yrl
- za
- bat-smg
- fiu-vro
- en-gb
- zh-classical
Remarks:
- The last two are redirected to variantless portal pages. The next version of the script is going to filter redirects.
- The two codes preceeding them are obsolete, and redirect to Portal:sgs and Portal:vro, respectively. The next version of the script is going to filter redirects.
- "dlc" is an unassigned language code, at the moment. It had been deleted. Deleted versions of the Portal page say, in brief, summarized:
- Elfdalian language
- 639-3 = dlc
- 15924 = Latn
- translators: M.M.S. [ talk · contribs ]
- note: The code dlc was removed from ISO 639-3 before its publication, but not because it is not a separate language, but for political reasons: Sweden threatened not to ratify ISO 639-3 unless they removed this code (along with scy Scanian).
- "dum" stands for Medieval Dutch I think, but when I am not mistaken, it is not accepted as a language of its own right by many authors. Do we really use it somewhere?
- "vmf" is currently defined in ethnologue but its definition is flawed in a manner that it is not obvious, which of three different and distinct central German vernacular languages is meant, that of the city of Mainz, capitol of Rhineland-Palatinate, that of the Frankfurt/Main vincinity in South Hesse, or that of big parts of Upper Franconia in Northeastern Bavaria. The first translator in the list takes it for the latter. Don't know about the others.
Greetings - Purodha.
- zh-classical = lzh
- fiu-vro = vro
- en-gb is a variant
Thank you for the update. Most of the items on the list have not had translations added in over a year. I am adding them more or less in a block together, with date of last activity by a registered translator noted in the edit summary.
Some of the items are languages no longer supported here, for example wym and num. I do not intend to add these to the page, unless told otherwise. Unsupported languages are: ady, chb, eur, num, wbl, wym, yux.
Mh, I may have been adding wym and num too quickly, then. I might think about finding the last edit of a message of each language in the script, too, if there is a simple way to do so which I believe atm. Yet, that there was no edit is not necesasrily an indication the we have no translator, or cannot support a language - most notably for new projects. They may happen to attract and excite existing or new translators.
There is another issue - Extension Babel is able to support more languages than the ones, we usually translate to. It's only 6 or 12 messages for a full coverage, when the MediaWiki interface is not localized to that language. This poses yet another question of what "active" means.
Nothing is simple!
With regard to the last edit of a message, I ignored edits by fuzzy bot and by staff members.
There could be more supported languages where the translators haven't written their names at the bottom of the portal, or where the syntax is not the template needed by the software.
Indeed ;-)
The script catches both the template syntax and a user page link, but not a plain text name. (There are too many plain text remarks there)
Only languages having no translators listed would slip through, but are listed by the script for safety. There are only en, tokipona, and tw at the moment.
Good hint to ignore specific edits!
You should have yua on your list of supported languages with no translators - this is a new language (oops, I mean new to translatewiki.net!).
Seems neither in the list of supported languages nor having a translators subpage nor listed in this page, thus - no, it does not show up.
But it is in categories: Languages without translators, Languages, and Languages without Wikimedia projects.
Have just tried to find yua in the three categories Languages without translators, Languages and Languages without Wikimedia projects. For some reason these are listed under the letter 'U' instead of 'Y'!
Sounds like bugzilla stuff. It could be the intl category collation.
Reported on bugzilla 28736.
Some more small problems with the categorisation. Portal:Tw is not included in the category Languages without translators and this category is not listed at the bottom of the page. This language is supported although it has no translations nor any translators as yet. The portal Tokipona is also not included in the category Languages without translators but it is also not supported. I don't know enough about wiki syntax to know whether the reason for this is the way the template Portal is written, or whether it is another problem with category collation. I won't report this on bugzilla unless requested to do so by a staff member.
As of today the category Languages without translators contains 64 languages without translators which are supported by translatewiki.net, and it should contain one other language as explained above.
Just read comment Thread:User talk:Jon Harald Søby/Updating the language by language family page/reply (5). That's a word. I am certain that also this comparison can be scripted. Will look into this next time, too.
Rerunning the (updated) script revealed:
Languages with translators subpages and zero translators[edit source]
Languages with translators subpage being a redirect[edit source]
Listed languages without translators subpages[edit source]
Listed languages with zero translators[edit source]
- av - very occasionally is translated by users not showing Av on their Babel boxes.
Languages not listed despite translators[edit source]
Languages listed but not supported[edit source]
- ady - fixed in SupportedLanguages
- av
- num - removed from languages by language family list
- wym - removed from languages by language family list
Languages supported but not listed[edit source]
This looks like nearly nothing to do on it. Greetings.
Thanks
The list was last updated on 2 September 2011, I think. Perhaps I could put the request on Purodha's talk page, so that this thread can be treated as closed by everyone else.
Yes but it's his own edits to the old list, Niklas. Or did you mean something else? Anyway, running the script shouldn't be too difficult if it still works, let me try.
I run the script but I didn't look at it, I see that there are some hard-coded codes and I don't know what it means; is this output useful?
Languages with translators subpages and zero translators[edit source]
Languages with translators subpage being a redirect[edit source]
Listed languages without translators subpages[edit source]
Listed languages with zero translators[edit source]
Languages not listed despite translators[edit source]
- bal - redirect
- chb - disabled
- dlc
- dum
- en-ca - variant
- eur - disabled
- go
- kjj - disabled
- niq - disabled
- num - disabled
- osi - disabled
- thl - disabled
- wbl - disabled
- wym - disabled
- yux - disabled