How can we reawake MDC? IV – Issues related on localization work

Remark: This is the last of four related posts. Please read others (I, II, III, IV) too. And please forward all comments and discussions to dev-mdc list at lists.mozilla.org.

Requirements or Comments from the Localization Communities to Wiki System

To avoid the further community destruction, we want to list the requirements or comments to the wiki system of MDC. Of course, we hope we have another active localization community, which could be more activated or destructed..
As noticed in other parts of this proposal, most of these lists are purely REGRESSION from MediaWiki to DekiWiki. The basic culture of MDC were build upon MediaWiki, so many localization communities desire to use these features.

This is a list only reflects our issue, so we propose to make discussion among the localization communities for the desired requirements’ list with prioritized to build and enlarge localization communities.

Remarks: [global] means non-localization related, [l10n] means localization related, [community] means issues directly affects to the community building.

  • System is totally slow.
    • Server performance problem affects everything.
    • Community members stopped updating after failure to submit
  • [l10n] Lack of build-in language system, including inter-language link
    • This might be something kernel/core for the all issues on the language handling.
    • ‘language neutral’ is really harmful and troubleful for localization communities
  • [l10n] Lack of language-independent template system
    • Important for localization communities to build their own management
    • Also important for avoid mis-edition on templates (including garbage localized templates.)
  • [global, l10n] Major/Minor flag for each update
    • Major/Minor flag for the change is really important for localizations.
    • User can determine whether the change is catch-up for en or minor fix
  • [global, l10n] Flags for user category
    • ‘bot’ flag for bot-like auto-program is important to tracking
    • MDC Japan Project will NEVER re-build bot system without this
  • [l10n] Lack of inter-language revision matching database
    • Like SUMO dashboard
    • Hard to make patch from the localized revision to top of en
    • In MediaWiki era, MDC Japan Project provided some system covering this
  • [l10n] Hard to check on diff view mode between revisions
    • Especially, it is difficult to check link targets without some special comment in edit summary
  • [l10n] Useless language determination system
    • Two independent system: ‘directory in URL/path’ and ‘flag per page’
    • Interconnection between these two must maintained via hand.
  • [l10n] User page is mixed from every languages into one page
    • Localization communities used user pages to discuss only in their language
  • [global] Search by language is not fully working
    • Might not be fixed before implementation of language independent system
    • User pages are mixed language by language
    • Cannot reject language independent pages, such as templates or so
  • [global, l10n] No access ranking page by page
    • Hard to determine which page is important to translate
    • like the page in MediaWiki or SUMO dashboard
  • [l10n, community] Access or update counter for languages
    • MDC Japan Project provided useful graph from this data
    • We made localization community members to encourage translation or update
  • [global] Wiki syntax is totally different from other Mozilla sites
    • Cannot easily make diff to SUMO or others
    • Members of localization communities are sometimes in common
    • Many convert modules exist for MediaWiki syntax, including from HTML
  • [global] Wiki syntax is different from wiki.mo
    • Cannot migrate from wiki.mo directly via copy and paste
    • Project documents or technical documents are not transferred from wiki.mo to MDC, and finally they are not translated (Ubiquity used wiki.mo for l10n)
    • We cannot convert wiki-syntax text on the browser (text area) itself
  • [global] Many contributors want to use plain text (wiki syntax) but not GUI
    • Main targets of MDC is developers who like vi/emacs, but not users
    • Even wikipedia uses wiki syntax but not GUI :-P
  • [l10n] Redirects of un-translated or un-exist pages are useless
    • On MediaWiki, we can show some text via template system
  • [global, l10n] No feature of review requests
    • Technical review requests for en version (We had some page on MediaWiki?)
    • Translation review requests for l10n version (depends on the policy of each localization community)
    • Lack of communications are ill for localization community
  • [global] Upper/Lower cases are mixed in language directory
    • By means of indexing services, we must fix case (or make URL as URI)
    • Make harm for places database in Firefox
  • desirable extensions per localizations (in MDN etc)
    • SSO with SUMO/SUMOMO etc.
    • Local download feature (for offline documentation or search)

Other Memo

Other misc memos or notes from localization communities.

  • Template syntax of the current DekiWiki is not bad.
  • GUI editor itself is not so bad.

Responses are currently closed.