Review of supported languages
The total of supported languages is now 306. Of these, 81 languages have had no contributions by a human translator (excluding bots and staff members) in over a year.
Thanks for the research. Is there something that can/should be done about these?
I guess we should check who did contribute in the past, and send them personal e-mails to try and get them to contribute again. Thanks for the hell of a job, Lloffiwr. This is something we should have a script for to determine, I guess...
Yes, a personal e-mail could help. In some cases the only registered translator for a language made no contributions at all - perhaps he/she couldn't understand the system, perhaps personal circumstances changed. Might it help to invite requests for advice to be posted to support or to somebody's talk page? I think I am willing to volunteer to be asked questions by the recipients of the proposed e-mail.
Perhaps a message on the wiki or incubator wiki if it has one could also help to recruit replacement translators.
I will post a list of the 81 languages here soon. Having a script to identify inactive languages and contributors would be great, if it doesn't drive someone crazy trying to write it!
We should design a template for an e-mail to send them. It should have a clear message (contribute to translations for MediaWiki), and allow them to get going without too much trouble. Any proposals to start off with? I could probably also send a mail to them in bulk if that is preffered. Would still need a list of users for that, though.
List of languages:
Ab Ak Akz Arn Avk Bfq Bi Bqi Cbk-zam Ch Chr Cps Dv Dz Ext Ff Fy Gn Gom Guc Gur Ha Ilo Jut Kab Kea Kgp Kg Kk Kri Krj Lfn Lij Lmo Lo Loz Lus Lzh Lzz Mwl Mwv Nan Nap New Niu Njo Nov Pam Pdt Prg Rap Rmy Rtm Sdc Sei Sg Sgs Sli Sma Srn Swb Sxu Tcy Tg Ti To Ts Tsd Ttt Uz Vmf Vot Yrl Za
I'll try to dig up a list of users that have contributed to those languages in the past and post them on a new page that I will link here. After cleaning it up, we'll send them a mail.
If you wrote to the registered translators of these languages you would have covered most of the contributors - I have spotted very few translators who weren't registered for these languages. Also, a list of past contributors will miss the registered translators who haven't contributed at all, of which there are quite a few. However, if some of these languages have had imports of messages, then I am not sure how to identify the person making the imports.
First draft of an e-mail:
Greetings from translatewiki.net where you are registered as a translator for (or have contributed translations to) the language [name of language] (link to portal). It appears that no translators for [language name] have made any translations during the past year, so we write to remind you about us. We hope that you can find time and opportunity to make some contributions to [languagename] and/or find some others who could help to translate, perhaps starting with the 500 most used messages in Mediawiki (link to messages).
Find out about all the latest projects which use translatewiki.net for localisation (link to project list). Read the introduction to translating (link to web interface page). If you have any questions on how to use translatewiki.net please ask at Support (link), or try asking in another language (for example Russian, Arabic, Hindi) on the talk page of that language.
With best wishes.
Apologies for being quiet for a while. I'll try to catch up on this this week.
No hurry.
I have created a list of users that have contributed to these languages code (at least, as far as we have records, which is since July 2008) on User:Siebrand/Idle contributors.
I'm on the list, and so are some staff members!
The list doesn't make a note of the language associated with the person. What is best, to redraft the message not mentioning the language or look up each user to find the language?
Also as mentioned above this list doesn't include registered translators who haven't made any contributions either at all or since July 2008. Do you want to compile a list of registered translators for these languages and combine the two lists together, or just stick with one list?
Can do more, but should in that case probably compare user page category membership. Feel free to clean up the list, I have also done that for a few usual suspects.
Sorry, don't understand "compare user page category membership".
You asked me to draft an e-mail and I have done that above. The draft e-mail includes a reference to the language associated with the person. the list of users doesn't mention the language. So, either we redraft the e-mail without mentioning the language, or we add the languages for each user to the user list. Which do you prefer? If we are going to add the languages for each user to the user list, can this be done by a script, or do you need me to add them manually?
I will start to add the language code to each user name on the idle user listing over the weekend, unless I hear otherwise from you.
I'm in Vienna today and all weekend for the Wikimedia Fundraiser Summit. No time, I fear. Your efforts are highly appreciated.
My commiserations on your working weekend.
I have found that quite a few of the translators registered for these languages are not proficient in those languages. I have listed the ones with proficiency 0, 1, 2 seperately. The e-mail above is not very suitable for them. So I have drafted an alternative e-mail, to do with as you see fit:
Greetings from translatewiki.net where you are registered as a translator for (or have contributed translations to) the language [name of language] (link to portal). It appears that no translators for [language name] have made any translations during the past year, so we write to remind you about us. We hope that you can help to find some others who could translate this language here.
Please visit us [link to home] to find out what's new at translatewiki.net. If you have any questions on how to use translatewiki.net please ask at Support (link), or try asking in another language (for example Russian, Arabic, Hindi) on the talk page of that language.
With best wishes.
The list of idle contributors is ready. I have added registered translators who were not on the original list, by reviewing SupportedLanguages. I have deleted languages which have variants which are active, that I didn't spot the first time round. This leaves 74 languages on the list, I think.
This has been quite a long process, but it has thrown up a few interesting things, so that's all right. If (but only if!) a few of these languages become active again, I'd be happy to do this job again sometime - I expect it would take a lot less time the second time round.
Bump
Siebrand: should we find someone to do this?
Yeah, I think GerardM :).
Has an e-mail gone out yet? If not, do you want me to send the e-mails manually, one by one?