Requests for Comment/Meta translation reform

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

This RfC is closed as follows.

• Proposal 1: Successful
• Proposal 1.1: Successful
• Proposal 2: Successful
• Proposal 3: Successful
• Proposal 3.1: Successful
• Proposal 3.2: Unsuccessful
• Proposal 4: Unsuccessful

Agent Isai ^{Talk to me!} 15:34, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

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The translation process on Meta, as implemented today, is truthfully less than ideal -- Important pages lack full translations in many languages, while trivial pages with low priority for translation have received translation attention in multiple languages. In addition, it must unfortunately be said that there are often translations being made with classic machine translators or due to lack of knowledge of the target language where a modern machine translation servuce such as DeepL or even ChatGPT could have provided a translation of better quality.

We must then ask ourselves whether we want to continue with the current translation process -- missing important page translations, partially-translated pages, and below-standard translations -- when users could simply use performant machine translation services instead and have better quality. Therefore, there are two main solutions to this issue: (if technically possible) integrate machine translation (preferably DeepL) on Meta and have translators simply review and correct output where needed, or keep the current model but only allow certain users to translate.

Because integration of translation services still has unsolved problems, I propose in the meantime we at least strive for better quality translations on Meta.

During the drafting phase a more radical idea, that of eliminating translation was proposed. There will therefore be two overarching options here: 1) eliminate translation on Meta, 2) reform and improve translation on Meta. The reform proposals will be presented first and the last proposal will be the one that calls for elimination. Reception123 (talk) (C) 08:23, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 1 (Translator group)

Only users who have 'translator' rights are able to translate pages.

Rationale: As part of the following sub-proposals to establish rules for getting/keeping/removing translator rights, this consolidation of translation permissions allows those new criteria to be enforced.

Support (1)

1.  Support On a wiki that is viewed and relied on by many people, it makes little sense to continue allowing anyone to translate pages. Not only can there be potentially wrong translations that mislead people but there could even be malicious ones. Reception123 (talk) (C) 08:23, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
2.  Support if option 4 fails. We've had enough stray instances of questionable IP translation edits it makes sense to tighten access to translation. --NotAracham (talk • contribs • global)
3.  Support if In case Proposal 4 is not successful this is a logical step to prevent any user with no verification to be able to translate any page. --DeeM28 (talk) 10:39, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
4.  Support per above. MacFan4000 ^{(Talk Contribs)} 13:33, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
5.  Support if Option 4 were to fail. BrandonWM (talk • contributions • global • rights) 14:51, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
6.  Support better than 4 Commetian Empire (talk°•◇•°CentralAuth) 16:56, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
7.  Strongest support As one of translation volunteers, who also spotted machine translation attempts the last time ... Legroom (talk) 17:31, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
8.  Support per Reception123 and Legroom. Translations should be quality translations. – Jph2 (talk) 23:00, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
9.  Support User talk:Anpang 05:10, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 1.1 (Criteria for translator group)

Translators are appointed at the discretion of Meta administrators. Translators will initially be appointed for a trial period of 15 days. If a Meta administrator is satisfied that they have performed well they will be appointed indefinitely.

In order to be appointed translator, a user must:

• confirm that they have read MediaWiki's documentation for using the Translate extension and that they understand how to prepare a page for translation;
• have at least level 3 (Babel) competencies in both the target language and in English; [1]
• provide a few examples of pages that they intend to work on if approved

[1] While users usually self-certify their Babel competency level, administrators may use their discretion in deciding whether the user actually fulfils that criteria.

If a translator has repeatedly translated pages poorly or otherwise misused their rights, their translator permissions may be revoked.

Rationale: These new criteria require that the user...

1. has the practical knowledge to use the translation tools
2. has the language proficiency to create good-quality translations
3. has a specific project that they plan to pursue

The 15 day trial period allows the meta administrator to confirm all criteria are met and that a request isn't simply hat collection by the user.

Support (1.1)

1.  Support If we want to continue translation, it should certainly be quality translation and at the very least better than machine translation. That's why I think it's important that users who translate are actually knowledgeable in both languages. Reception123 (talk) (C) 08:23, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
2.  Support if option 4 fails, as a strong support. If a translator isn't proficient in source or output language to level 3, what value does that add over utilizing a Google Translate or DeepL browser extension? --NotAracham (talk • contribs • global) 08:54, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
3.  Support if If Proposal 4 fails it is clear that we do not want to continue with below standard translations that affect the reputation of this farm and give the impression that it is not serious. The standards here are generous in my view and if someone cannot meet these standards it is in my view very unlikely that they will be able to furnish translations that are of a superior quality to some good machine translation services that exist. --DeeM28 (talk) 10:41, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
4.  Support per above. MacFan4000 ^{(Talk Contribs)} 13:33, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
5.  Support if Proposal 4 fails. BrandonWM (talk • contributions • global • rights) 14:51, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
6.  Support per Reception123 Commetian Empire (talk°•◇•°CentralAuth)
7.  Strong support fully agree with Reception123's and NotAracham's reasonings. Legroom (talk) 17:49, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
8.  Support This makes a lot of sense. My only reservation is the arbitrary 15 day "validation" timeframe. Seems to me 30 or even 60 days might make more sense, although I also admit I don't know how often translations take place. However, I also suspect they are not overly time-sensitive. I do recognize a longer "grace period" increases the chances of something falling through the cracks, so to speak, but it also doesn't prevent revoking the role if the user doesn't satisfy criteria. A longer period simply wouldn't put pressure on the validation process. – Jph2 (talk) 23:17, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
9.  Support User talk:Anpang 05:10, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 2 (Translation administrators)

The translation administrator group is eliminated and the 'translationadmin' right is given to translators.

Rationale: Similarly to rollback, this group has limited scope and it's unnecessary to assign 'translationadmin' permissions separately if stricter translator criteria are approved in proposal 1.1. If translators misuse 'translationadmin' permissions, their translation rights will be revoked for misuse of permissions as per proposal 1.2.

Support (2)

1.  Support per above, I don't think there's any need for this very minor additional hat. Reception123 (talk) (C) 08:23, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
2.  Support if option 4 fails as a logical reduction of excessive hats. --NotAracham (talk • contribs • global) 08:52, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
3.  Support Similarly to the Meta usergroup RfC which took place a long while back I am not at all a supporter of minor discretionary hats that are given to certain users without any clear basis. Unless there is a good argument to be made I do not see the purpose of this group if a translator group exists. In the case that Proposal 4 is successful the natural conclusion for this proposal will be the removal of translationadmin rather than adding it to the translator role. --DeeM28 (talk) 10:44, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
4.  Support BrandonWM (talk • contributions • global • rights) 14:51, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
5.  Support if current translation administrators keep their positions. Commetian Empire (talk°•◇•°CentralAuth) 17:05, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
6.  Support if current translation administrators keep their roles, like Commetian said. It just makes sense to role translators and translate administrators into a single role. – Jph2 (talk) 23:22, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
7.  Support User talk:Anpang 05:10, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Oppose (2)

•  Oppose I’m not sure giving all translators the pagetranslation right is a good idea. Somebody should not have that right if they don’t understand how the syntax works. It really should be limited to people who know what they are doing when it comes to making pages translatable. MacFan4000 ^{(Talk Contribs)} 13:33, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

  @MacFan4000: That's why in Proposal 1.1 one of the conditions is to confirm that you know how to prepare a page. Reception123 (talk) (C) 14:04, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Abstain (2)

1.  Abstain MacFan4000 ^{(Talk Contribs)} 14:30, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Comments (2)

1.  Question: What would happen with existing Translation Administrators? Would we automatically be added to the translator group? Or would we have to reapply? There are also people like me who don’t contribute any translations, but still put some time into making pages translatable. MacFan4000 ^{(Talk Contribs)} 15:12, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

   My personal druthers would be to either keep the separate role for grandfathering/operational purposes (or find another home for this) but grant the right to translators if this passes. (I'm also not 100% sure if the extension would act up if the role was removed...)

2. As a point of order, the rationale references a proposal 1.2, but the final RfC does not include proposal 1.2. I'm not sure how the lack of proposal 1.2 impacts the ability to prevent abuse of translator admin rights. It seems unlikely to me current translation administrators would overstep their bounds if combined with translators vs. the other way around, however. – Jph2 (talk) 23:30, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

   1.2's revocation standards were folded into 1.1, legacy language will be interpreted according to this. --NotAracham (talk • contribs • global) 03:56, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Comments from Drafting Phase (2)

1.  Comment: If DeeM28's proposal does not pass, while I would not be opposed to giving translation administration permissions to translators, I would like to see the translation administrator group revamped to include the delete user right, to assisting administrators in removing unmaintained pages. It would still be a discretionary user group, but would have a higher level of competency and would shift from marking updated translation pages to removing unmaintained translation subpages. Dmehus (talk) 16:28, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

Proposal 3 (High traffic pages & Review) (added by DeeM28)

In order to ensure professional translation on Meta, only high traffic pages may be translated.

Administrators will maintain a list of high traffic pages that may be translated. Examples of such pages include

the Main Page, global policy pages and other pages of importance.

Certain important pages may be disallowed from translation for legal considerations, such as the board of Directors page and subpages, where translations may introduce excessive risk

Note: This proposal is subject to the translator group proposals (Proposal 1, Proposal 1.1) passing.

Support (3)

1.  Support I often see many quite specific or niche pages being translated where there really is little need. It's also difficult for all translations to be "peer reviewed" to make sure they're professional if there's so many small pages being translated so I think it makes sense to focus on ones that are actually likely to be read by users who aren't proficient in English. Reception123 (talk) (C) 08:23, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
2.  Support if option 4 fails, current efforts are spread thin on low-value pages for translation, this would be a first step towards applying efforts more wisely --NotAracham (talk • contribs • global) 08:44, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
3.  Support if In case Proposal 4 fails this option is the next best option in my view as it eliminates translations for low traffic pages where they are likely not to provide much use to a large number of users. The current situation which allows any page to be translated even if it is very specific and not widely used is not an effective use of any person's time. --DeeM28 (talk) 10:46, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
4.  Support per above. MacFan4000 ^{(Talk Contribs)} 13:33, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
5.  Support BrandonWM (talk • contributions • global • rights) 14:51, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
6.  Weak support better than 4, but we still are depriving people who don't understand English of some pages. Commetian Empire (talk°•◇•°CentralAuth) 17:03, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
7.  Support the idea of prioritizing pages, but  Oppose to the idea of disallowing translation of the most "important" pages - this frankly makes no sense, you are leaving people to use worse option, machine translation, on pages with significant information and hope it's gonna do well? Why having translations in the first place then? If we are about to limit translation to fully trusted and knowledgeable users, there will be little risk in translating those pages. Legroom (talk) 18:05, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Oppose (3)

1.  Oppose Like Legroom said above, I support prioritizing pages for translation based on importance. If translation is desired, however, then all meta pages should be eligible for translation. Different translators are likely to have different priorities on what pages they think merit attention before others. They may even have localized or cultural understandings that play into their perspectives that shouldn't be minimized. As for "legal purposes", policy pages I've reviewed all specify the English version takes precedence legally. If this isn't already specified on translated pages, it should be, thus eliminating the legal concern. – Jph2 (talk) 23:38, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
2.  Oppose Wouldn't it be weird if the main page had translations and it linked to some other page, like a policy, and suddenly that doesn't have a translation not because no one translated it, but they literally couldn't? User talk:Anpang 05:12, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

   @Anpang: I can't really see pages linked from the Main Page that wouldn't qualify as "high traffic" under this proposal. The only main one is probably Contributing but if you can't understand that page in English it's unlikely you'll be able to become a global volunteer anyway given that at least en-2/en-3 will be needed to interact with others. Reception123 (talk) (C) 10:04, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

   It was just an example. User talk:Anpang 01:14, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Comments made during drafting phase

1.  Comment: I personally would just like to see translation suspended and eliminated, per your well-articulated rationale in Proposal 8 and my comments on the outmoded Translate extension and its sub-optimal design as well as the evolution of AI and universal translation tools rendering the necessity for human translations by a very small, and infrequently active, core group of translating volunteers obsolete. For relatively stable and high-traffic global policy and the main page, I can see a weaker case to retaining them. I wouldn't be so keen on restricting approval to certain languages, though, if someone maintains them. Administrators can already delete unmaintained translation subpages, and this was something I tried to do regularly as a Meta administrator. It's just not being done regularly. Dmehus (talk) 16:25, 21 May 2023 (UTC)
2.  Comment: My main issue with this is that I'm not sure what's seen as "all relevant pages". Personally I think under this proposal it would be okay to only have the Main Page translated for example. Though if there's a narrow definition of all relevant pages that could be interesting. Reception123 (talk) (C) 17:31, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

   Thank you for your comments, Reception123. I wouldn't be opposed to keeping the Translate extension, and to repurposing the moribund translator user group that includes the ability to mark pages for translation, but I'd still like to perhaps repurpose the patroller group to include additional janitorial/mopping permissions, so long as we have additional criteria for granting and clear but also flexible criteria for revoking (i.e., edit-warring, recidivism following administrator warnings or guidance, etc.), to include the ability to remove unmaintained or no longer maintained translations. If we do limit to specific pages, I would think Miraheze, Help center, and most of the key global policies would be good to have translated. I don't think we necessarily need to have translations of all the Meta user group pages, particularly as ChatGPT and future AI models (i.e., Google's Gemini) continue to evolve. Basically, any page that is not frequently edited. We may also want to consider having a new page protection level, associated to that revamped patroller group. Perhaps revamp Meta:Patrollers as Meta:Janitors? Dmehus (talk) 17:45, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

3. @Dmehus: @Reception123: Thank you for your comments. I have taken them into account and have a new proposal that allows translation for important pages but still contains the approval requirement. The reason is that without the approval requirement translations can not be fully professional because a real risk persists of users overestimating their translation capabilities and producing poorly translated pages without check as administrators evidently are not able to properly review translations into languages which are foreign to them. Requiring two translators for one language will mean that one will be able to review the other. In regard to your new Meta Janitors group proposal I believe that is an idea that ought to be considered but it might be best not to have too many things decided in a single RfC and to first decisively decide the issue of translation in a direction or another. I invite you to make changes to my proposal if you believe they are useful and also to propose a different one altogether if you are unsatisfied with my idea. --DeeM28 (talk) 14:42, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

   I do not wish to presume that the lack of response signifies agreement but I have deleted my former proposal text and only kept the current one. I hope it is acceptable and only would require minor changes. I strongly encourage other users to also comment on this as I believe it would be a significant change that requires wide support. --DeeM28 (talk) 13:36, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

   I hope you don't mind but I've made some changes in order for the proposal to be more interlinked with the original translator group idea and for an additional language approval to no longer be required as long as there's two confirmed translators. In addition, I've also separated out the removal part into a separate proposal to not make this one dependent on that as well. I hope that's acceptable. Reception123 (talk) (C) 15:13, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Proposal 3.1 (Removal of current translations)

Any current translations that are incomplete or otherwise poorly done will be removed. This includes incomplete or poorly done translations of high-traffic pages.

Support (3.1)

1.  Support I don't think it helps anyone to have a half translated page or even a poorly translated one that is equal to or worse than what a user could easily get with a machine translator. Reception123 (talk) (C) 08:23, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
2.  Support if If Proposal 4 is not successful pages that are not translated entirely are not likely to provide any use for anyone and may actually lead to the opposite. Pages that are poorly translated are in a similar way not useful and there is no justification to retain them. --DeeM28 (talk) 10:49, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
3.  Support BrandonWM (talk • contributions • global • rights) 14:51, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
4.  Support if the pages (that will be deleted) have not been added to or updated in over three months. Commetian Empire (talk°•◇•°CentralAuth) 17:00, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
5.  Weak support While I support the concept of removing poor/no quality translations, I share Legroom's concern in opposition as to how the "quality" of the translation will be determined. – Jph2 (talk) 23:47, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
6.  Support User talk:Anpang 05:10, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Oppose (3.1)

1.  Weak oppose How are you going to determinate poor or abandoned translations, on which criteria? And either can be used as basis for proper one. Although if it's obvious that someone fully relied on Google Translate (like Commetian Empire did from my observation) then yes, it's better to drop it, or fix asap, if possible (what I tried to do yesterday). Legroom (talk) 18:34, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Abstain (3.1)

1.  Abstain This conflates two issues - partial translation (which needs more definition on when things should be classified as abandoned before action is taken AND when action should be taken) and poor-quality translations (which should absolutely be removed if they are of lower quality than what can be achieved via machine translation). Despite my personal view that there are better approaches on offer in this RfC, I would grant weak  Support if option 4 should fail to the removal of subpar translations. — Preceding unsigned comment added by NotAracham (talk • contribs)
2.  Abstain MacFan4000 ^{(Talk Contribs)} 13:33, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 3.2 (At least two translators)

Translations may only be done if there are at least two users who have translator rights who are able to translate into the specific language.

Oppose (3.2)

1.  Weak oppose While I found this idea interesting originally I don't think it really works practically as it would be difficult for two translators to coordinate requesting translator or otherwise request and be on a "waiting list" until the second translator appears. Reception123 (talk) (C) 08:23, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
2.  Oppose It's hard enough finding one translator, I think there are other ways to achieve the same due-diligence outcome --NotAracham (talk • contribs • global) 08:34, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
3.  Oppose MacFan4000 ^{(Talk Contribs)} 13:33, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
4.  Oppose This isn't truly practical as the WikiTide/Miraheze community may not have several users that can (or want to) translate in a language. This would prohibit translations for a lot of languages that don't have a broad community. BrandonWM (talk • contributions • global • rights) 14:51, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
5.  Oppose There probably won't be enough people for two for each language. Commetian Empire (talk°•◇•°CentralAuth) 16:58, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
6.  Oppose Not just impractical, demotivational even. Legroom (talk) 18:11, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
7.  Oppose Like everyone else said, particularly BrandonWM and Commetian noting there may not be two translators for a particular language. – Jph2 (talk) 23:54, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
8.  Oppose Many languages only have 1 person who can translate to it. I'm gonna change this to a support if any Thai replies to this. User talk:Anpang 05:13, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Abstain (3.2)

1.  Abstain After reading the comments made and reflecting I understand that this solution is not very practical. I believe that having a single translator is still a problem as there is no one to check whether the translations are of a satisfactory quality. If Proposal 4 is not successful and the safeguards that are being proposed in the original proposals are not satisfactory a different solution to this problem should be considered at a later date. --DeeM28 (talk) 10:53, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 4 (Elimination of translation) (added by DeeM28)

This proposal is bold and may even be considered by some as "radical" which is why I should explain in a more detailed fashion. I believe people generally on Meta are afraid of saying quiet things out loud, of attempting to change significantly a certain function that has been done for a long time or to take an important and decisive decision. The proposer above identifies the issues related to translation and proposes some methods in order to fix these issues. I can agree that the issues may be improved by those measures but I do not think that it will be significant. I would like to say that this proposal in no way has anything against multilingualism or the fact that Miraheze is clearly a global platform. I think it is necessary to eliminate translation is because it is very likely that it has a very minimal usefulness due to its incomplete and imperfect nature. With the rise of powerful translation websites and extensions/add-ons for browsers it cannot be said that users who do not speak English are not able to very easily have pages translated. If we were able to have all pages translated in a professional, coherent and full manner I would be glad to be able to continue but the issue on Meta is that pages are often only partially translated or not translated at all or translated poorly or some pages have translations and some do not. I do not believe it is possible at this time for Miraheze to properly fix this issue. Translation of all pages is a feature that is likely inspired from Wikimedia's Meta wiki but is unsuitable for Miraheze Meta in my view. I understand that this proposal is a long shot and is likely to be opposed by the translator aficionados here on Meta but I do not see a reason for why it should not be presented as an option in case someone finds favor with this idea. I of course propose to leave pages that are already translated up so that translators time has not been wasted out of respect for their work. I also take this opportunity - in case anyone has time to fully read my text - to enquire to system administrators whether they are able to provide statistics regarding how many people actually use the translated pages daily. --DeeM28 (talk) 14:46, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

Translation on Meta is generally suspended for an indefinite period of time.

Pages that are fully (100%) translated in a language and are done so in a professional/rigorous manner will remain and may be updated as needed. All other translations will be removed.

Support (4)

1.  Support Conditional support if the other proposals fail. While I prefer Proposal 3 as it preserves some important pages for translation (also for SEO purposes) I would rather have this more radical proposal if the others fail rather than the status quo of unregulated and poor translations. Reception123 (talk) (C) 08:23, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
2.  Strong support As much as it pains me to throw out good work done by translators acting in good faith, MH Meta is host to a large number of inadequate verging on inaccurate edits for years from well-meaning folks using machine translation with little to no practical knowledge of the languages they were attempting to translate. Rather than assume accuracy and try to review the absurd number of one-off translations (why is template translation even a thing?!) I view it as preferable to simply call it a day and let the massively-improved quality of machine translation serve the community instead. --NotAracham (talk • contribs • global) 08:31, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
3.  Support Based on the reasoning that I have given above this is in my view the best option. --DeeM28 (talk) 10:36, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
4.  Strongest support Overriding all my other votes, this is my first and foremost support vote. Translations cause a lot of problems on Meta and require constant patrolling to ensure that no machine translations are being employed and all work is done by the user. It causes problems for readers when something is wrong, it causes problems for sysops to patrol. The common denominator is translations, which cause problems. If a user wants to translate, that's totally fine. But in Google Translate or DeepL outside of Miraheze, using a web browser, because what we have currently is a mess and a problem. BrandonWM (talk • contributions • global • rights) 14:51, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
5.  Support After giving this some thought I have decided to support this proposal for the reasons already articulated above. Universal Omega (talk) 08:37, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Oppose (4)

1.  Strong oppose (this is mirroring HeyTürkiye's vote) As someone who has been translating pages I see into Russian, it does take a lot of work and effort to do it. If we get rid of it, then Miraheze would be throwing away all the work of the people who did it. Also, like HeyTürkiye said, there are some people who don't understand English and only their native language. That would be taking away their chance to read the Miraheze documents. And doesn't Miraheze want to be the wiki host that can host the most and most differing wikis, along with including everyone? Commetian Empire (talk°•◇•°CentralAuth) 16:51, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
2.  Oppose Translation is significant part of platform accessibility, and to some degree reputation - we are getting a user friendly service. Having only single language means making users who struggle with understanding it to use poor methods of translation, which undoubtedly affect platform's impression, as in having to do extra steps to understand how things work in the first place. But we need better quality control of translation, absolutely, and I do wish there was better alternative to Translate extension. I'm actually okay with previewing proposed earlier AI translation. Legroom (talk) 21:14, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
3.  Strong oppose Like Commetian and Legroom said, I think translation is important to platform accessibility. As a wiki creator, I often translate wiki requests using google, but I really appreciate when the requestor makes the translation to English for me. While non-English speakers can use their preferred translation method, having pages translated for them is welcoming and increases accessibility. I don't mind using google to translate wiki requests because that's my role, but ordinary users shouldn't have to go through that step if we have translators available to provide quality translations for them. – Jph2 (talk) 00:06, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
4.  Strong oppose Same as Commetian. User talk:Anpang 05:10, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Abstain (4)

1.  Abstain MacFan4000 ^{(Talk Contribs)} 13:33, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Comments (4)

1.  Question: So if this proposal passes, and if we go to machine translations; will there be an extension for it? So that other wikis can have the same machine translations that Meta does. And what translation platformwould we be using? Commetian Empire (talk°•◇•°CentralAuth) 01:28, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Comments made during drafting phase

1.  Strongest oppose I would like to give my vote before RfC starts. I am absolutely against this proposal; I am a person living in Turkey, I know English at en-3 level. For both other users and myself, it would be logical to continue reading and translating each page in the native language of the person. For your information Hey Türkiye ^Message? 18:00, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

    Comment: In addition; I can't let my translations go to waste. There is a labour; there is a work done. You have spent hours and minutes for this translation. Reading English does not always benefit people; there are people who do not speak English. That's why we do what we do; translation in accordance with that language. I do the same. I translate the text into my own language to understand it better, then I edit it if it contains a loss of meaning - otherwise the text cannot be read. One thing is that there are many users here (including me) whose first language is not English. So I wanted to use my strongest opposition to defend our rights, and I wanted to make it clear in this comment why I voted the way I did. As soon as the RfC starts, my vote stands - I will not edit the proposal even if there is no edit in it. I respectfully announce. Hey Türkiye ^Message? 18:13, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

2.  Support A bit bold indeed, but I was actually thinking the same thing here. For one thing, the Translate extension is showing its age. Moreover, rapidly evolving AI models and deep integration within search look set to render English Wikipedia and even the multilingual Wikipedias redundant. In short, Wikimedia Foundation looks set to be facing an existential crisis in the next several years, as it would not surprise me to see English Wikipedia's traffic plummet, as Google gradually begins replacing English Wikipedia infoboxes in search results pages with continuously improving AI-generally supported search results. Nearly all users on Meta Wiki have some degree of English language knowledge, and AI, as the proposer notes, continues to evolve and get better and better, rendering the need for translations obsolete. It also artificially increases edit counts and page counts, on pages which are edited too frequently to be translated by a very few number of volunteers. Dmehus (talk) 16:19, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

Comments made during drafting phase (Removed proposal)

1.  Comment: This seems like the inverse of Proposal 8.1, which I would tend to prefer. Rather than have a list of excluded pages, we should maintain a list of included pages for translation. Requests to have pages added to that included list should be made at the applicable venue, Meta:Administrators' noticeboard or Stewards' noticeboard, as applicable, and must include a compelling rationale. So rather, perhaps we could revamp Proposal 7 with the aims of Proposal 8.1, rather than have risk having proposal and counter-proposal bloat? Note, most pages in the Tech: namespace are already not translated, though there may be occasional non-technical guideline that could be useful and, in this way, such a page could be added to the list of included pages, if there's a compelling rationale. Dmehus (talk) 18:23, 21 May 2023 (UTC)
2. I  Oppose the "even machine translators are better". Not sure if it's good at like, European languages that don't depend on context that much, but with literally all other languages, they seem good, but you look closely at the actual meaning and they're all terrible. Human translations will always be better. User talk:Anpang 05:10, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

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