Maintenance of page - adding new languages
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.