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Allow hiding links to languages which don't meet a completion threshold
Open, LowPublicFeature

Description

Showing links to pages are not fully translated (by some threshold) or which have many outdated translations can be counterproductive. Not showing links to these languages could deter drive-by contributor translating only simple parts and then leaving (whether that is a good or bad thing).

Event Timeline

Tacsipacsi changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Aug 1 2022, 6:46 PM
Tacsipacsi subscribed.

There are several pages where links to translations with only a few or even no translated content are useful:

  • Pages making heavy use of templates. Maybe there are few or no units translated directly on the page, but 90% of the content is made up by 100% translated templates.
  • Pages where few but important translation units are translated. For example, a very long page where only the introduction and the headings are translated. The progress may be only 5-10%, but the reader gets a good overview of the topic in a language they’re more comfortable with than English.
  • Pages where the percentage of translated units is low, but the actual translation state is much higher. For example, a page is made up of a few large, paragraph-sized translation units and many small ones consisting of only one or two words, and the large units are fully translated, while only a few, if any, of the small ones is translated. The small ones may be even perfectly understandable in the target language, and could be made optional (T255815).
  • Categories also often use the Translate extension. In this case, not the actual translation is what matters, but the category members, which are there even if the page is 0% translated (or even if the page doesn’t exist at all, T285463).

There are also special situations where the links are useful even if links to the same pages would generally not be:

  • As a translation administrator, I want to see how translations are rendered. Maybe I want to get an overview of how many translations exist so that I know how much cleanup is needed after a breaking change like renaming a translation variable; maybe I want to make sure the translation appears correctly in languages with special needs (CJK, right-to-left, non-ASCII digits…).
  • When translating messages to be distributed using MassMessage or MediaWiki messages on translatewiki, I prefer linking directly to translations instead of using Special:MyLanguage if the translations exist, as Special:MyLanguage uses the UI language, which is likely to be English in case of cross-wiki (potentially even third-party) users. (This would cause suboptimal UX for people whose native language falls back to the language I translate to, but there are no languages falling known to Translate back to Hungarian.)