Talk:OKA/Instructions for editors

Harvard citations are only one type of short citation. This section should probably be renamed "Short citations", and all (or almost all) occurrences of Harv changed to short. Mentioning Harv as one of the types would be fine. Mathglot (talk) 19:49, 29 July 2024 (UTC) Reply

Thanks! I've updated to reflect this 7804j (talk) 19:45, 30 July 2024 (UTC) Reply

There are several ways to cite the same source from several locations in the article. The original method, supported by the Wikimedia software and thus built in to all language versions of Wikipedia, is en:WP:Named references. Short citations (including Harvard citations) are not part of the Wikimedia platform, and are implemented by Wikipedia volunteers as a Module; in English Wikipedia, it is en:Module:Footnotes. The Module is widely copied to other projects, including 124 Wikipedias, thus probably includes all the languages currently being used by OKA translators; but it is not guaranteed to be present for every language. Mathglot (talk) 19:59, 29 July 2024 (UTC) Reply

Thanks Mathglot!

@Maye Fernandez @Sintropepe @Racnela21 Could you add the suggestions from Mathglot into the ES and PT language OKA guides, regarding short citations? 7804j (talk) 19:48, 30 July 2024 (UTC) Reply

Sure, I'll edit the PT version. Racnela21 (talk) 20:13, 30 July 2024 (UTC) Reply

I saw no mention of what is very likely the best tool for finding quality gap topics. It is an xtools application that anybody can use. You provide a language pair, a category, and a category depth (use '1' to start), and then it finds all of the gap topics, i.e., a list of all of the articles in the source language for the given category, that do not have articles in the target language Wikipedia.

Example: here is a list of featured articles in Portuguese that have no article in English. If a translator has a particular interest area they would like to translate in, they can choose their own category from the SL. If a translator from French is interested in biographies of French people, then they can choose from this list of several hundred French articles to translate. English does not have to be the target language; here are all the French biographies not present on Spanish Wikipedia.

In my opinion, this tool should be front and center for OKA translators looking for articles to translate. If they have no subject preference, they should default the category to "Featured article" in the source language. This tool relies, of course, on proper linkage in Wikidata, which is not 100% foolproof, either (although mistakes and omissions are infrequent). After choosing a source article to translate, they should nevertheless not skip the § Check for similar articles in English step. The most likely hiccup is probably when a foreign Wikipedia has an article, English Wikipedia does not, but does have a broader article containing a section devoted to the topic of the foreign article, but I think your instructions already cover that case. The point being, the tool is a big timesaver, but you still have to do your due diligence in searching the target Wikipedia for similar topics. Mathglot (talk) 20:33, 29 July 2024 (UTC) Reply

That's an amazing tool! I unfortunately did not know of it :O

I will experiment with it a bit, then add it to our instructions 7804j (talk) 19:51, 30 July 2024 (UTC) Reply

You were wise to mention the different rules for different Wikipedias at § Don’t wait until you know all the rules before publishing. I sometimes need to know the difference between rules at different Wikipedias, and one way to do that, is just pull up the rule, say, en:WP:No original research on English Wikipedia, and then scan down the language links (left sidebar in Vector 2010, top right dropdown in default view) and hover or click it. This will let you know that WP:OR is fr:Wikipédia:Travaux inédits (WP:TI) in French, or es:Wikipedia:Wikipedia no es una fuente primaria (WP:FP) in Spanish.

Not sure if it would be helpful to mention this on your instructions page or not. Also, even when the shortcuts are different, as in this case, in many cases foreign WP editors add redirect shortcuts, so that sometimes the same shortcut works there; for example, Spanish Wikipedia has es:WP:OR which also brings up their OR page. (However in French, fr:WP:OR is their Ornithology WikiProject, so it doesn't always work.)

As I work cross-wiki, I sometimes want to know these distinctions, so I created a table-generating template to show the equivalences among a brief selection of policies, guidelines, info pages, templates, and other useful pages; you can see it at my en-wiki User page by clicking '[show]' after the last user box. It is by no means exhaustive, basically just a proof-of-concept at this point, to see if it would be helpful to me (it is) but would require more work to add more rows, to be truly useful. Columns are partly parametrized, and need to be fully parametrized. The template supports 13 languages, but you only see the table columns there of personal interest to me, for example. See this page for (minimal) documentation. If you or someone wants to take it on for further development, be my guest. Mathglot (talk) 21:11, 29 July 2024 (UTC) Reply

Thanks Mathglot! That's a very good tip.

I'm not sure that our translators will need the table itself, as many of the policies are not directly applicable to them (e.g., no legal threat), but it's useful to remind them they can find the matching policy through the Wikidata links

@Racnela21 Could you add this tip to the instructions, and share it as well within our internal chat? 7804j (talk) 19:59, 30 July 2024 (UTC) Reply

Sure, I'll do it. Racnela21 (talk) 20:09, 30 July 2024 (UTC) Reply

The following sentence appears in section What should not be linked (in the pink box):

Do not link to pages that redirect back to the page the link is on (unless the link is to a redirect).

It's a bit convoluted, but I get it, up until the parenthesis, and then I get lost. What does it mean? By definition according to the first part of the sentence, it *is* a redirect. Can you explain? Mathglot (talk) 22:35, 29 July 2024 (UTC) Reply

I agree, I also don't understand what is meant... I've fixed it, thanks for spotting! 7804j (talk) 20:04, 30 July 2024 (UTC) Reply

A tool is available at en:Module:CS1 translator which will automatically translate the most common foreign citation templates (cite web, cite book, cite journal) from more than a dozen foreign Wikipedia languages saving translators the time of converting them manually.

Citation templates such as Spanish es:Plantilla:Cita libro, French fr:Modèle:Lien web, or Portuguese pt:Predefinição:Citar periódico each contain localized parameter names which will not work at English Wikipedia (or at any other Wikipedia except their own) such as:

• {{cita libro |apellido= |nombre= |enlaceautor= |título= |url= |idioma= |otros= |edición= |año= |editor= |editorial= |ubicación= |isbn= |capítulo= |páginas= |cita= }}
• {{Lien web |langue= |auteur= |titre= |url= |date= |site= |éditeur= |isbn= |page= |citation= |consulté le= }}
• {{citar periódico |último= |primeiro= |último2= |primeiro2= |data= |título= |url= |periódico= |volume= |número= |páginas= |doi= |acessodata= }}

When users translate articles which use any of these templates, there is no need to convert them. Support exists to translate them automatically, for twelve to sixteen languages, depending on the citation template in question. The complete list can be found at en:Module:CS1 translator#Supported templates.

The mechanism is a bit different than editors are used to, as it does not involve substing a template, but rather exposing the templates and then waiting for a bot to come along and subst them later, so there is usually a short delay. The module documentation claims tat citations embedded within <ref> tags are not translated, but I'm not sure this is still the case, because I see plenty of examples of in-line foreign citations having been translated by the module, even though they are embedded in <ref> tags in the body. (If it is still an issue, there is a workaround using the |id= or |ref= params that I can explain later.)

For how it works, see for example English template, en:Template:Lien web which has the same name as the French template, and which redirects to en:Template:Cite web/French, which invokes the module. The others all work in the same way. See en:Module:CS1 translator#Supported templates for a complete list. This module applies to translations *to* English Wikipedia. The module exists in ten other Wikipedias for translations into those ten languages, but I don't think any of them are one of your target languages. Mathglot (talk) 02:25, 31 July 2024 (UTC) Reply