Individuals and groups often follow some kind of list of articles to translate. Those lists are often informal (personal notes, a list in a user page or just an idea in the user's head) and lack integration with the rest of the translation process. By providing an integrated support for them, we can improve the whole translating experience.

This is a general Epic ticket to describe and discuss the idea. The workboard is at ContentTranslation-TranslationList. Specific tickets will be created for individual aspects. More details are provided below.

Goal

• Increase engagement. Allow users to keep track of the articles they want to get translated easily. This will reduce missed opportunities for translation (e.g., not having time to translate the article they just found right now)
• Increase discovery. Make it easy for users to find interesting articles to translate.
• Increase collaboration. Sharing lists on specific topics that interest a community can encourage user participation. Participating together in a campaign can help to motivate users.
• Track the progress of topic coverage in each language. Some languages cover some topics better than others, and this will help users understand which topics need better support and help complete it. The topics themselves can be defined by users and communities.

Scenarios considered

1. Collecting articles for later. The user finds an interesting article but has no time to translate it now. The user can mark it so that it is easy to find later to do the translation. This can happen at different points:
   • Explicitly. The user just thought about an article and wants to add it for later.
   • While reading. Some content is missing or a page is not available in the user language (interlanguage link entry point).
   • When getting suggestions. The user finds an interesting suggestion, for later.
   • When translating. The user encounters missing links on articles that are worth creating in the user language.
   • When completing a translation. The user may want to add other articles from the same collection.
   • Based on other collections and the like. Other articles in the same category/collection/"list of"-article of a given article.
2. Create a list of articles for a contest. The user is organising a campaign on their local wiki.
   • Add several articles efficiently.
   • Set the conditions of the campaign (languages, time period, etc.).
   • Allow other organisers to add/propose articles.
   • Share and connect the campaign with the information on-wiki.
   • Follow the progress of the campaign.
3. Find interesting lists of articles.
   • Discover, keep accessing relevant lists (and not do so, when they are no longer relevant).
   • Get motivated on why pick a list and keep translating it.

Research information

There are many translation projects that use a task list that tracks the progress of translating a list of articles, with a different focus:

• Some projects target single editors working on something that interests them. For example, with CX we already saw people translating articles on common topics, such as beaches of Spain, Fields medalists, or Queen albums. They can just look at categories in other languages that they know and see what's missing, or prepare a list of red links on their user pages.

• Some projects target small groups of wiki editors working together. For example, in the Hebrew Wikipedia there is a small group of people that write or translate articles about UNESCO World Heritage sites. They have navigation templates for each country with the full list of heritage site in that country, with links to all the relevant future articles, and work according to these templates, gradually making all the links blue.

• Some projects target large groups, for a long period of time - months or years, and with multi-lingual coordination. Possibly the most notable of such projects is the Medical Translation Project. It has wiki pages with lists of important articles to translate, tracking status of each article in each language, etc. Some of these lists are on-wiki and some are in public Google Spreadsheets. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_task_force/RTT . Another example is WikiProject_Missing encyclopedic articles in the English Wikipedia.

• Some projects can be simpler and run for a few weeks. For example, Catalan Wikipedia had projects to create chemistry articles missing in Catalan, and to create writer biographies for Catalan writers missing in other languages. The Galician Wikipedia ran a campaign to translate articles about Galician culture to other languages. A similar 20-20 campaign was organised in Welsh Wikipedia.
• The British Museum organised a translation campaign to obtain "featured" articles of topics relate to the museum in different languages.
• Editor campaigns (and the technical design) illustrate usecases for campaigns targeted at more general editing (not translation).

Learning the needs of these different groups of users and providing them with comfortable, automated and well-structured ways to create and update such task lists will help them focus on writing and translating and work less on the bureaucracy.

Solutions to explore

A prototype captures many of the design ideas which were later evaluated with user research.

• Integrate the collections as part of the suggestions view. Suggestions, and "For later" will be just two special default collections.

List creation:

• Allow to add articles to a list as an alternative to start translating for the different entry points:
  • Red links on a page (can be a recently translated page; a manually-created task list; a navigation template; etc)
  • Special pages (WantedPages, WithoutInterwiki)
  • Category in another language (Example: I know English and Hungarian. English Wikipedia has 200 articles about Nobel laureates in the appropriate category, Hungarian has only 70. I want to add the 130 missing articles to my task list in one click.)
• Allow to add content not only from main namespace (e.g., allowing curated short article versions).

Campaigns and participation

• Support list configuration and sharing
  • Support both monolingual ("I only care about translating from English to Hungarian") and multi-lingual ("I love Thai culture and I want articles about Thai music translated to as many languages as possible") cases for both the creators of campaigns and those accessing them.
• Show user statistics and progress to motivate participation. (T114750)
• Track progress of (big) campaigns you organised (presenting all the info organisers need about articles, participants and progress).

Discover lists and items to translate

• Allow to create/add lists.
• Surface shared lists when searching and getting suggestions.
• Subscribe to get notifications for new opportunities to translate (e.g., subscribe/unsubscribe from lists to get notifications of new articles added).

The project is currently planned to be carried in three milestones:

1. T114744: CXTL-MS1: Create a new translation list - planned for Language-Engineering October-December 2016
2. T127016: CXTL-MS2: Share a Content Translation task list
3. T114750: CXTL-MS3: Track translation task list progress

Each of them has its own subtasks. All are essential to the project's goals.

1. Related tickets
2. T87439 - Suggest articles to translate from the dashboard (can reuse at least some of the UI; suggestions list can come from personal or common task lists)
3. T100283 - Simplify article selection to translate.
4. Gather - it has lists in the database, although it requires more research about how useful it is to combine them