As part of MinT for Wiki Readers MVP (T359072), this ticket proposes to create a "home" for machine translation that provides users with basic access to machine translated versions of Wikipedia articles. This landing page allows users to start the process of selecting a page to translate and the language pair for such translation.

The next step in the process is to search for a topic (T359494) or to select a random article (leading directly to the "Confirm step", T359512).

Design details

This step includes the following elements:

• Header. The robot icon and the "Automatic translation" label serves as a header to communicate the functionality. This is integrated into the current skin. In the example we can see how the mobile (Minerva) skin is used with the general navigation header visible at the top.
• Search bar. Access to the search input will lead users to the next step of the search workflow (T359494: MinT MVP: Search for topic). "Search for a topic" is used as placeholder. See the SearchInput Codex component.
• Language pair. Two actions allow to select a specific source and target language in case the user wants to specify it in advance. The actions are supported by standard Button Codex components, and the pair includes an ArrowNext icon between them. Both actions will open the standard language selector (T287860), but presenting a different set of languages:
  • The source language selector allows to select any language for which there is a Wikipedia with an additional "All" option, which is the default to support users to search in any language.
  • The target selector allows to select any language supported by MinT, including those for which there is no Wikipedia yet. The language of the current wiki is the one set by default.
  • Languages selected will be remembered for future interactions. This includes immediate and future times when the user returns to this and next steps in the process. Persistence of this info is not critical, so simple technical mechanisms such as the browser local storage can be a viable approach even if the information is not kept across devices or for a long period of time.
• Info panel. Provides general information about the topics available to help establish a better understanding of multilingualism on Wikipedia and provides an option to select a random article leading directly to the "Confirm" step.
  • Random topic action. The "Random topic" action will lead the user to the "Confirm" step (T359512) with a random article pre-selected. If possible, the same algorithm/API used on the wikis. This could be based on the Special:Random where the specific Wikipedia language to request the random page is also randomized. Alternatively we can consider the Random item function from Wikidata (but making sure that a Wikipedia article exists for the selected topic).

Messages

The info panel provides different information depending on the source language selected:

Generic version, when the source language is "All":

Millions of topics on Wikipedia can be automatically translated into <target-language>.

Language-specific version when a language different than "All" is the source:

<number-of-articles> topics form <source-language> Wikipedia can be automatically translated into <target-language>.

• The <number of articles> can be a humanized version ("6 million topics" is preferred to "6,012,345 topics")

Additional considerations

• A new special page will be created. It will be initially only available for mobile and on a testing environment (test/beta Wikipedia).

For more details:

• View in Figma
• Check parent ticket: T359072: MinT for Wiki Readers MVP