Wikipedia talk:Administrators' noticeboard/CXT/Pages to review

Encoding and numbering

How comes you have encoding errors? Nemo 08:10, 2 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I tried to fix some but it's a pain to merge the correct list into the commented list. If you want I can publish a

list with proper namespaces, languages and correct encoding in another page, but I can't merge it here. Nemo 09:23, 2 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Please don't do this again. The comments are important: if you obliterate them we'll end up checking the same material twice.—S Marshall T/C 11:29, 2 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Also, why did you reset the numbering in each section? Each article had an identifier, now it's harder to navigate.. Acer (talk)

As I said, I asked to help fix. Of course we could have saved several hours of work if the list had not originally been pasted here with encoding errors... Nemo 06:01, 5 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

French articles

In looking through the French so far, the majority seem fine. I'm beginning to think, at least perhaps for widely spoken languages, that this -- and especially this -- is all much ado about nothing. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 14:39, 16 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Shawn in Montreal: I mostly agree although some of the Spanish articles are pretty bad and things get worse fast once you start looking at articles in non-Romance articles. But where French is concerned we seem to be set to delete a lot of good content. Elinruby (talk) 12:44, 10 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Couple of questions

Would anyone mind if I removed all the underscores from the article links? They're making life that little bit harder when ctrl+f'ing in the source. Mortee (talk) 21:52, 17 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Also - unrelated - within 1-1000 and within 1001-3583, are the numbers important? I was thinking of rearranging some related pages to be next to one another within those sections, e.g. the souks, the sheriffs of Merionnydd by century, the 'of Constantinople' articles etc, so people can address them in batches. Mortee (talk) 22:27, 17 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Looking at Bible of Borso d'Este on this list, it's redirected to Borso d'Este Bible, also a translation from five days later. That page isn't here though. Why might that be? Mortee (talk) 17:12, 18 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

More pages for you

Here's some more pages for the list, via a user subpage which lists created articles, many of them using the mw:ContentTranslation tool. (To estimate overlap with CXT, I took a random sample of ten articles there and searched for them here; no matches.) I came upon this via my work at WP:PNT, and have listed around 70 translations from that subpage at WP:PNT (1, 2 (permalink) ) and commented upon them at the user's talk page (3, 4). Mathglot (talk) 07:37, 25 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Instructions subpage

@S Marshall: Can you please add an instructions subpage listing ideally, what and how you would like helpers to do to help with this backlog? What is the procedure? For the time being, I've merely scanned 1301–1349, and marked them for src lang code and current byte count; that is (some of) the info I'd like to see, if I were about to choose a page to translate or review. What's the goal here? Are we trying to apply delete criteria to each page, and note a delete code next to the name, if we feel that it applies? If you can create an instruction page with a numbered step-by-step containing your suggestions on how to attack a given article and what kind of notes or remarks you'd like to see attached to each one, that would be helpful. (I'm talking procedural instructions only; I don't need any instructions on the translation aspect or how to decide if something is a good translation or not, assuming it falls within my competence area.) Or if it's short enough, just prepend the instructions to the numbered list, otherwise link it. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 02:22, 2 April 2017 (UTCt

@S Marshall: I second this request. Also the earlier comments about grouping some of the articles together. I came in here to ask about that, actually. Some of the articles about the madrassas and souks in Tunis are actually pretty good, with many images and significant discussion of architectural detail. It seems to me that if we do articles on individual buildings in Paris -- which we do -- then these even older buildings are probably notable. But if not, the content should be combined into Madrassas of Tunis or something of the kind. Along the same lines, somebody has created a great many articles about female French track and field athletes. I really don't want the job of fixing them myself because I find the very idea of track and field very boring, but they don't need that much and I don't see what they are hurting. There are a LOT of one line articles about 16th and 17th century mathematicians, astronomers, philosophers and so on. Any reason why we shouldn't combine these into a list, until some wants to expand the individual entries? They're a bit silly right now and I suppose someone could claim they're unreferenced, but there is in each case an image of a publication, so I believe these people did exist, and the one I verified was real even though language was an issue in the verification. Also, what is the policy about individual works of art? There are also many articles about a single painting, all of which do seem to be notable. And the articles I have looked at in that category seem at least somewhat well-written and referenced. I spent some time going through the list of articles tonight and still think there are many good articles there. I am going to go ahead and strike a few of them, but if we are planning to nuke from orbit, should I take them off the list altogether? How does the script you're working on work, @Mathglot:? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Elinruby (talk • contribs) 04:41, 10 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict)@Elinruby: Careful before you strike out anything, because I think that prevents something from being nuked, which is exactly why we need instructions about this. I hope User:S Marshall will respond, but at a high level, the objective in my mind is "indicate which articles are worth saving, and which ones aren't, and mark them." The "rules" would help in specifying 1. how to mark pages to save, and 2. how to decide which ones to save. For #1, my understanding is, that ~~strike out type~~ means save; don't delete, and anything else, means "include in mass deletion". That needs to be made clear before anything else.

After that, there's the issue of "how do you decide which ones are worth saving", which is a much more subtle question, but in my view, could have a relative, rather than an absolute meaning. I think that any article that an editor is personally willing to put in the time and effort to save, is worth saving. Which might mean some editors might mark a lot more articles to be saved than another, but that just mirrors how Wikipedia works generally, with some editors editing a lot more articles than others. So, "if you're willing to fix it, then mark it for saving [and follow-up on your commitment]" would be my rule.

As to what "fix it" means, I think that's more absolute and doesn't depend on the editor, because WP has core principles of verifiability and attribution that are requirements, and which could be violated by saving unverified translations that introduce factual errors. I care less about errors of English grammar, spelling, syntax, or style that don't affect comprehension—if that's all they are—than I do about translation accuracy, because any editor can come along and fix up the former later. But only the translators can verify that the translation is factually correct. So I would say if you mark something "save", that means, "I am willing to personally go through this article, compare it to the original foreign article, and verify that the translation is faithful and accurate as to the facts. When I'm done, I will add {{translated page}} to its talk page." If an editor isn't willing to commit to that, then they have no business marking it "save", imho. What if the topic is a really terrific, highly notable topic, that is crying out to be included in en-wiki, but you don't have time for it now? Make a note of it, move it to your sandbox, whatever; but it shouldn't remain in main space at this time (and I see the argument for not moving it to draft space as a way of preventing just pushing the dirt around, without actually cleaning it up).

Remember what the {{Translated page}} template does: it provides attribution to the original article, once it is full translated. This is not just a nicety; this is a core Wikipedia licensing requirement. WP:COPYWITHIN says: "Wikipedia's licensing requires that attribution be given to all users involved in creating and altering the content of a page," and "copying content from another page within Wikipedia requires supplementary attribution to indicate it" (emphasis added). Not an option. Requirement. That's as core as it gets. Translated pages must be marked, either in WP:Edit summary, or preferably, with the template. If you're not willing to verify the translated article is faithful to the original and give it your "stamp of approval", then don't mark the page, and let it get nuked. You can always recreate the page again later, any time you feel like working on it. Mathglot (talk) 23:04, 10 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I don't own or control this page. The way I've managed it in the past may not be optimal, but here's my idea for your consideration. Firstly, a user examines the page and identifies the source language. They tag it with its source language and move on. (I've used little flag icons.) Secondly, a user examines the pages with source languages they speak. They strike out the page if it's okay. If it's not okay then they make a comment ("May be fixable and worth fixing, but too much work for me right now") or just flag it for X2.—S Marshall T/C 23:24, 10 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) that's what I thought we were doing. (Except I don't know (though I suppose I can look up) the code for the flags. But. I just wrote a really long answer that contains a proposal, which sounds exasperated because I am, for a more global approach to translation generally and also specifically to these articles. I suppose I should edit the exasperation out but I think it's somewhat justified if not necessarily caused by the people I am talking to here. So take it with that grain of salt please -- it is intended as a desperate plea for rationality

yes, striking out an article has meant it is not part of this problem. I have not done it much to date because a) I am an incrementalist and I assumed that someone would verify that the article was in fact ok, which stopped happening months ago, and b) people seem absolutely determined to nuke perfectly good content so we are moving, in my mind, from identifying possible problems to triage to see what can be saved. I found several last night that are as good as anything I have seen on Wikipedia, and, well, you can look at my edits but my other assessments ranged downwards from there to "pretty bad" and "kill it with fire". So. It's not like I am being softhearted, but on the whole I disagree with wholesale nuking; these article simply do not justify the hysteria. Frankly, would probably write Wikipedia off and stop trying to help it if anything anywhere near that arbitrary takes place. I have already sunk a considerable amount of time into assessing these articles and, well, I don't get it and I don't think it is me. Possibly what we have here are differing definitions of translated. Which is why I keep asking questions which apparently make people think I don't understand this process. Or perhaps its the female-looking name. Who knows. I am past caring. I probably quit anyway if this Luddite policy is not addressed.

Let's start with the translated template. Actually, the documentation says that anything that seems dubious should be omitted from the translation, and there is no requirement that everything in the article be translated. I frequently omit historical tables of mayoral elections from articles about villages in France because seriously, is it notable? Probably not, in English, imho. The translated template is required because of differences in copyright law. It is good for absolutely nothing else and I have never yet met a new page patroller that knew what it was. Now. the faithful translation may well suck, for the good reason that it is a faithful translation of kind of a sucky article. My process has been to translate, then fix stray code (like the template french uses to put an "er" behind the 1 for example), and the wikilinked dates, and templates in general, actually, then re-read for sense, check the wikilinks to make sure they are going to the articles they should, etc. Then do references, Bibliographies, lists of works or credits or whatever. All while fighting off people who think that anything they haven't heard of isn't notable. And wikipedia wonders why it loses editors. Bah.
Then there is tone -- once the mechanics are handled, there are often, at least in French, editorial comments that are inappropriate here, and these need to go if they crept in simply because translation happens one piece at a time and it may not occur to the translator as he ponders verb tenses that yanno, this paragraph does not explain exactly why it was such a bad thing to refuse to surrender the castle (or whatever) or that the average english speaker understands certain words in a way that was not intended by the author. This assumes that no cognates or colloquialisms are causing problems. Let's say that the translator was careful and competent -- we're talking about a translation from scratch, not a repair job.
someone has almost certainly tagged the page as needing additional references by now, or as promotional, or both. Chances are it really does lack references by our standards and although they are not required to be in English, many new page patrollers don't know this and of course references in the language of the article will be useful to the largest number of people. In my opinion titles which are not in English should include a trans-title field, but I don't know if this is a requirement. As for promotional -- if I am translating it I don't think it's promotional, but some people have strange ideas on the topic. Someone told me the other day in this discussion that if somebody is selling something, the article is promotional. This is is ridiculous on the face of it. Promotion *is* an issue and I have dealt with quite a number of paid editors. Sure. But let's see -- applied literally this rules out all articles about sports, musicians, art and software. Just off the top of my head. The criteria for notability for musicians is (among other things) significant collaboration with a notable person OR multiple major-label releases OR awards OR length of career. Any one of those, but generally notabilityy will be questioned non-English-language subjects and then we gotta do AfD drama and deal with the echo chamber over there, cause I am here to tell you the people who comment on the AfD boards often never even look at the article, and are operating purely from preconceptions.
Adding detail and clarity - Finding the references is the impetus for this, for me anyway. Some quotes for flavor, especially for anything controversial or contentious.

So. Where in the above process do we stop calling the process translation? Apparently we are requiring all of this and additional education of our fellow editors as well before a translation is grudgingly deemed acceptable. Oh and let's not forget that it must, if it's a repair job, be checked line by line against the original, never mind that the original is probably pretty bad if the article needs repair.

And that's the best case scenario. God help you if you take it upon yourself to fix something (and before someone else tries to "educate" me on wikipedia standards, my idea of something comepletely fixed up is Castellane for example. I am not foisting bad articles on Wikipedia, omg. I just can't help but note that machine translations are being help to a much much higher standard than all other wikipedia articles, and yes, I see that policy. The policy needs to change. Automation is not going away -- that's an expert opinion -- and automated translations are at least three orders of magnitude better today than they were when that policy was written. I am willing to believe that this is not yet acceptable as a finished result when it comes to Arabic or Chinese, at least without heroic measures, and even for a related language like French I personally would go several of the above steps beyond that before calling something done. Nonetheless good, even excellent articles are being produced with this tool.

I am writing all this out in hopes someone will actually read it and answer intelligently. I have listened to ALL you-all rant and sometimes some of you are right. I understand the idea behind painted lemon, I think, and yes, it's a problem. Consider (say I for the umpteenth time) credentialling PNT people, or better yet require an independent check, which requires less heavy lifting on the back end and is only good practice anyway. That too is an expert opinion, or close to it. Wikipedia should decide whether it wants to implement article standards and if so it should do so in a less arbitrary manner. In addition:

In a world where translation talent is scarce, free up the translators from arguing about whether that article about a 16th century mathematician should be deleted as an unsourced BLP because they haven't brought the references across yet. Translated article should not be assessed until at least an hour after creation.
In a world where translation talent is scarce for God's sake don't wait until the article is done before haughtily informing the translator that soccer players aren't notable. Screen for notability first, seriously. This is why I avoid working on biolgraphies. Bonus points if someone puts all the policies in one place. Extra happy emojis if it's a single document like a flow chart.
In a world where translation talent is scarce, use your copy-editors where you can, because, remember, you are going to check the article in a separate process anyway, right?

As for this list, bah. Nobody has responded to my annotations (is readable but slightly awkward english ok? what about all the one-sentence articles on taxonomy (~8) 16th and 17th century academics (~120) or the start-class articles on French female athletes (~140) or the fairly detailed articles on buildings in the Tunis medina (~20) which all seem not quite ideal but certainly nothing to justify the hysteria they have sparked. But ok, fine, shout me down. I will just stop being a cautious incrementalist and conclude that as with the AfD boards there is no point in trying for consensus because nobody is listening. If nobody is looking at the articles except me then I guess I will just do what seems best. Elinruby (talk) 01:26, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Slash mashups

@S Marshall: Just did the 1501-1600 range for lang-ident, and there several entries that are what I'm calling "slash-mashups". That is, they appear to be two unrelated articles, or pages, that are simply joined with a slash. (In one case, the slash represents a legitimate subpage, but there's a missing prefix.) They are:

1518. Mikhailovmikhail/Никифорова,_Виктория_Витальевна
1521. Bjergbestiersken/Ursula_Meier
1529. GISD/doc (the subpage is actually Template:GISD/doc)
1590. Fredericknoronha/Abraham_Shipman

Does this represent some kind of bug in the tool that generated this list?

Please see WP:ANB/CXT#1501-1600, items 1518, 1521, 1529, and 1590 for details. Mathglot (talk) 07:46, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

None of the pages listed here have their namespaces, just their titles. Mostly they're in userspace: those four are at User:Mikhailovmikhail/Никифорова, Виктория Витальевна, User:Bjergbestiersken/Ursula_Meier, Template:GISD/doc, and User:Fredericknoronha/Abraham Shipman. —Cryptic 10:27, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I had caught the last two, as noted at their respective entries, but not the first two; thanks! Mathglot (talk) 20:01, 19 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

more items by banned sock

Another dozen items by banned sock Duckduckstop not already on the list:

Sibongile Sambo
Maureen Ayité
Oyindamola Fakeye
Chi-Chi Igbo
Xavier Bayer
Andrés Felipe Solano
Wendell Cherry ‎ this one is on the list also but it didn't look bad at all, though I rapidly scanned, only Elinruby (talk)
Public art in Barcelona so is this, though I did not check quality; did not feel like reading about the topic at the time Elinruby (talk) 01:15, 30 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Paula Grogger ‎ so is this, as above Elinruby (talk) 01:15, 30 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Herta Hammerbacher
John of Neumarkt - this one is on the list and it's bad enough for me to remember it Elinruby (talk) 22:04, 28 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Mathglot (talk) 09:37, 23 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

We can't apply X2 to those because they aren't on the list of articles that X2 applies to. :) Let's worry about them when the X2 deadline expires; but in passing, I'll mention that I'm coming around to the idea that there may be a case for a more general criterion -- a successor CSD criterion to X2 (perhaps G14?). It would need a full RfC to set up though. All the best—S Marshall T/C 16:03, 23 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Something that may - or may not - be helpful

I have just made a table in my sandbox with source information and timestamps for every page. Unfortunately it doesn't exactly match the order on this page (which, as far as I can tell, is some arbitrary order in which the database returned the original query results :() so merging them would be a pain. But at least you can sort on language :) T. Canens (talk) 11:33, 23 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Cheers, Timotheus, that's rather bloody helpful! All the best—S Marshall T/C 15:58, 23 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

starting to group the ones I suggested could be grouped

(french)

The Tunis articles Mortee seems to be interested in, leaving those for him for now but fwiw I agree. Some are very bare stublets but quite a few others are not, they are substantive and interesting Let's combine.

- apparently the creators of these articles think they are individually notable. I think that if they think so they should flesh them out -- thoughts? Elinruby (talk) 03:09, 4 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I have gritted my teeth and found the notability criteria for athletes, starting to work through the French track and field people

- These articles are admittedly boring, at least to me, and i don't want to fix them, but a LOT of them meet WP:NTRACK and how much can you say about a silver in the javelin after all? I've stopped striking them to see if anyone wants to discuss. Elinruby (talk) 03:09, 4 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The "list of sheriffs" articles are probably too long to group.

Elinruby (talk) 22:32, 28 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Elinruby: If you're still trying to group them, I've tagged another pile of articles since your last message above, including quite a few French athletes, among which a whole gaggle of French javelin throwers. Mathglot (talk) 08:19, 5 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot: there are about 150 female French track and field Olympians, etc. and about 50 other athletes of various descriptions I find the topic of track and field desperately dull but the athletes do mostly meet notability as far as I can tell. On the third hand I have no idea what to do with the articles. A lot of them are just lists of medals and world/national records. But isn't most Olympic coverage? Open to suggestions. I avoid BLPs in general and sports BLPs in particular. Some of these are also notable as early transgender personalities, just to add spice. Accepting suggestions. Elinruby (talk) 08:32, 5 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot: What does make sense to group is the madrasas and souks of the Tunis medina, maybe, and I had started on that until I saw that the authors of the articles think they should be separate articles. There is however a lot of overlap in content, although layout is an issue if we combine them. And I haven't done any fact-checking on it either. Elinruby (talk) 08:40, 5 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Elinruby: Yeah, noticed the souks/madrasas thing (and there's also quite a pile of eastern orthodox clergy, too; search for patriarch in the list, if you like grouping short stub articles, some just 1 or 2 sentences, into something more sensible). Btw: as long as you do the ~~strike~~ thing, you don't actually have to hurry up to group everything now before the nuke; not trying to slow you down, just pointing out that as long as the articles don't disappear, you can group later, which leaves more time now for finding the ones you are interested in, and saving them. "Strike now, group later," as it were. Mathglot (talk) 23:26, 5 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot: - also resistance fighters of various nationalities. I am looking more than striking for the moment. But there are quite a lot of almost-good articles, spoiled for choice there. Leaving comments, looking for commonalities.Elinruby (talk) 23:37, 5 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Questions on notability

Does anyone have any thoughts on determining the notability of:

Poets
Modern scientists - the policy doesn't seem to cover astronomers for example?
Historical figures such as:

Administrators in empires (example I saw was um a governor of Mozambique, 18th century)

there are a whole lot of very short stubs on European academics of the 16th century --> I am thinking List of 16th century astronomers or the like? Articles are *very* short

I am taking taxonomy stubs as notable--everybody ok with that?
I have no idea what to do about 17th century Greek Orthodox patriarchs; there are a bunch of these. Also saw a candidate for Catholic sainthood. Any thoughts?

Elinruby (talk) 01:05, 29 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

1. For poets, if there is significant critical work listed, they are notable. Otherwise check Worldcat to see from the holdings how impt they seem to be.

2. The usual standard for WP:PROF is citations, using Google Scholar or equivalent. If an astronomical object is named after someone, they are almost certainly notable.

3 Governor of a province or equivalent unit is notable if there is any documentation. They are always kept at afd. Similarly for mayors (or equivalent) of large cities.

4 These early faculty (mostly from the deWP) have always been considered notable when challenged

5 yes, Every named organism is considered notable .

6. RC bishops are always considered notable, and equivalent positions likewise. I think most Orthodox patriarchs are at least the equivalent.

In general, if there is questionable but possible notability, the place to deal with it is afd, not here. DGG ( talk ) 00:48, 4 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@DGG: thank you for that answer. Just trying to base my opinions in policy. Artists and individual works of art would have the same notability standard as poets, don't you think? And botantists with species named after them would be notable by analogy? 03:04, 4 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Artists have a very specific additional standard: that they have at least one work in the permanent collection of a major museum. And we usually consider that works of art in the permanent collections of such museums are every one of them independently notable. (one problem is that sometime this standard is met but the writer of the article didn't know enough to specify)

Poets are more complicated. The formal standard for `1ny of writers is extremely low, and in practice the notability of poets is often disputed. It is almost impossible for me to judge the significance of literary works published in small editions in most non-English speaking countries, especially because I do not know which are the major publishers. And tho I mentioned Worldcat, it covers non-English material very weakly--especially Asian and Latin America.

But I don't think we are called on to actually judge notability here. Certainly if it wouldn't pass speedy, there's no point keeping it here. Probably it it doesn't make a show of notability enough to pass AfC, there are higher priorities. In doubt, I suggest what I do at NPP, mark for notability or even Prod or AfD . And we need to keep in mind that AfD is not exactly consistent in many fields. DGG ( talk ) 04:57, 4 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@DGG: If it doesn't meet notability then there is no point in evaluating the translation or the facts is why I am asking. I don't normally do notability calls but I *really* hate putting translation time into a topic pro bono then being informed that it isn't notable, is where I am coming from. I have a list of about six articles from this list that I have said I would repair, and I am trying to help with assessing which ones should not be nuked, since apparently we are going to nuke a bunch of work whether I think it's a good idea or not. Reality, yanno. Some of these really are that bad but this is not my preferred solution Elinruby (talk) 07:05, 5 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

agreed, but unless it is obvious, the only place to find out is at AfD or by using Prod, which is often simpler. You don't really have to fix the translation first--just indicate on the AfD or Prod request that in addition to the problems with notability , it's a bad translation and probably not worth fixing. I check all Prods as a matter of course and have done so for many years, so I'll be able to confirm the non-notability. DGG ( talk ) 15:07, 5 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

and thank you for that. I am more of an inclusionist, but at least some of these should go. Still looking and commenting. Elinruby (talk) 23:40, 5 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

non-translations on the list

Do we know how this list was created? I was just looking at #1830, Bogdan Voda, Maramures county which is an article created in 2007, with no indication of its being a translation then, or later. I'm striking this one as a non-translation, and will do the same with any others I see like this, unless someone has a better idea. Mathglot (talk) 20:43, 4 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Here's another case, slightly different: #1836 Bubba is a cross between a disambig page and a stub about a nickname. It was created in 2005 and grew to 6800 bytes by Feb 2016, when 700 additional bytes were added from Italian using CXT tool (from Bubba Trattori), but the rest of the article comes from regular edits in English. It's now around 7500 bytes, and shouldn't be subject to nuking due to the fact that a small portion of it comes from use of CXT during the critical period. I'm thinking that the nuke bot should consider when in the rev history the tool was applied, and to what extent, and maybe take that into consideration. An article which had 10 years of hundreds of edits and 90% of its content already shouldn't be subject to nuking. (Even though this article in particular is terrible and might be subject to deletion for different reasons.) Mathglot (talk) 22:23, 4 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Changing to list format, because they keep coming up:

Mathglot (talk) 01:29, 5 May 2017 (UTC) updated by Mathglot (talk) 01:54, 5 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The list is (apparently; I haven't seen the query) every page with an edit tagged ContentTranslation. You can't just look at the page currently linked from here and assess what it currently says, you have to look at the history and make sure it's even the right page. Edits tagged ContentTranslation are invariably either new page creations or overwrites of existing pages. Bogdan Voda, Maramures county was created on 28 February 2016, not 2007 - the article it was later redirected to was created then. Bubba and Covadonga were overwrites. Bendita TV (Uruguay) is another that was redirected after creation. They all need to be looked at: the redirects because sometimes the content is merged; the overwrites because they haven't always been reverted and might not even have been about the same subject. And though you don't mention any in this batch, just striking redlinks without checking them isn't on, either: if the page was created in a different namespace, it may have been moved into articlespace after the list was created.

And no, no administrator is going to delete an article that was briefly overwritten by a bad translation and quickly reverted just because nobody's gotten around to striking it out here. —Cryptic 22:30, 5 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Cryptic: Thanks for your reply. Yes, I see your point. Don't know whether it's worth maintaining this list any further here, then. Perhaps just brief notes detailing history (such as you have done above) could be added to the entries on the main list instead, if that would be helpful. What do you think, would it? Mathglot (talk) 23:47, 5 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

deadline

Consensus is to extend the deadline to 6 June 2017.—S Marshall T/C 14:11, 7 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

At this point I think the deadline (which ends today) must be extended until there is time to actually review all the articles. They've been here long enough that another month or two will not matter. When we adopted BLP PROD, we simultaneous worked carefully through every single earlier BLP unsourced article, and most of them were very easily sourceable. DGG ( talk ) 04:16, 6 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, we're all volunteers here so we can't fire anyone for not being ready by a "deadline" ;-) so can't disagree about extending this to give everyone time to assess the ones they would like to look at. The only slight quibble I have with the above is that we don't actually have to review them all, we only ought to provide the time for people to review those which they have an interest in, that's why I'm going through marking lang tags (and other brief info) so that people can more easily and rapidly go through the list and find them. When everyone feels they've had the time to look at the ones they wanted to look at, I guess we're done. Given another month or whatever, I could mark and assess some more, but at some point I will have had enough and want it just to be over, but I'm not quite there yet so I'll probably do some more of them. Mathglot (talk) 19:28, 6 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I'm definitely there. :) I've had enough and want it to be over. People have had enough time to review and fix these. Kill 'em all. If we delete anything important then that can easily be reversed; you can generate a machine translation with a few mouse clicks.—S Marshall T/C 20:21, 6 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I understand this PoV, too, and can't really argue with it, as S Marshall has borne the brunt of this for a very long time, and as he says, anyone can recreate them effortlessly. @Elinruby:, I know you've been working tirelessly on this, commenting up the list and changing some articles as well. Did you want a day or two to go through the list and strike the ones you've already improved and/or commented on and indicated you wished to save, but did not strike? I could use a day or two to do the same, but don't see any reason not to nuke on Tuesday if you're done saving your faves by then. What do you think?

Or maybe even better: if you don't have time even to review and strike in the next couple days, just move all the pages you are, or even might be, interested in to your Userspace drafts, and then work on them at your leisure (or don't). Mathglot (talk) 20:44, 6 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot: I can argue with it. I have no intention of putting a thousand or so articles in draft space ;) Seriously? I don't think it's unreasonable to at least LOOK at these articles before they go anywhere. Some of them, as I keep saying, are really excellent. I possibly *could* be done in a day or two but I'd have to put everything else aside including sleep, and why should I have to, is my question. This the first I have heard of any deadline and I was not notified of a deadline to vote on the decision to, apparently, have a deadline. I wasn't aware that there had BEEN a vote, until you yourself let me know. In the course of our other conversations. Despite, as you say, my tireless work (although I am actually pretty tired, I have to say). I don't believe anything has been posted at WP:PNT. You are only here because I told you about this list. Where is @HyperGaruda:? Or anyone else?

What, honestly, is the harm we would be trying to prevent here by pulling the plug on these articles? I've already mentioned the really superb articles we'd be throwing out with the bathwater, Allow, me, please, to put my question in context by pointing out that I was refused permission to delete Impeachment of Dilma Rousseff even though it is the most one-sided piece of wikilawyering I have ever clapped eyes on, and I have seen some wikilawyering. And the WP:NPOV board essentially agreed, incidentally. Actually, let me save what I was just working on as the notification for your post came through: Talk:Impeachment_of_Dilma_Rousseff#Article_still_needs_a_complete_rewrite.

I am sorry that S Marshall wants this to be over; his level of emotion on this topic baffles me, but with all due respect I wanted answers to some intelligent questions and I did not get any of those until those until @DGG: came along a few days ago. Nobody has *yet* answered the one about the standard for track and field articles. On this page. Admittedly I didn't ping anyone, but if we are all working together on a deadline supposedly, it might have be nice to keep an eye on what one says one wants to be over. I am, sincerely, sorry, that some of the articles on the list failed to correctly guess the gender of a person. Some of these early articles were made with a beta tool and beta tools have bugs. My attempts to discuss the advent of neural nets in machine translation since then have been ignored and dismissed. I've been told I don't realize the work I am causing, omg, work that I have been quietly doing for freaking years over at WP:PNT. And that any article that in any way quotes anyone who might possible make some money is WP:PROMO.

It's not even so much the loss to Wikipedia of some rather fine articles and maybe a 100-200 more that we really should rescue, especially in a world where wikipedia has allowed Impeachment of Dilma Rousseff to exist. Someone out there took the trouble to write these articles. Some articles are bad enough that we wish they hadn't, but in other cases people have *given* Wikipedia something, oh let's say Double Ratchet Algorithm, that many people would pay excellent money to read. I have nothing to do with that one, btw, and did not need to touch it. Not one thing. Why should that person trouble him or herself to ever again try to give Wikipedia a clue?

It also does not seem to have occurred to anyone that we're proposing to delete a lot of material about South America and Goa and Greek Resistance fighters and Catholic and Chinese history simply because we can't be bothered to consult with someone from those cultures. But I am sure that nobody is listening to me this time either, with the possible exception of DGG and Mathglot. So. I'll give it to you in my native tongue: This workflow has not scaled and the decision-making processes surrounding this space are siloed and profoundly dysfunctional. Sorry if I take that a bit *personal* -- I have spent a lot of time trying to let that there information be free.

So let me get back to GSD. I may be done looking in a couple of days, yes, but sleep would be nice. I suggest we go with DGG's proposal and set the deadline 30 days out, but try not to need that much time since S Marshall has had enough. I have specifically marked some articles as really needing to go. If everyone else agrees then we can nuke those, at least as far as I am concerned. While I am making, you know, suggestions, maybe we could actually talk to some of the people who are not represented here. At least post on some Wikiprojects? Let the left hand know what the right is doing? Maybe we could delete Impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, ha, if we really want to delete some bad stuff. I just don't agree with the underlying assumptions of X2, sorry. I feel the discourse has not corresponded very well to actual reality. But I am doing my best to help with the actual real problems -- which do exist to some extent, especially in earlier articles -- without alienating even more editors and making the diversity situation even worse than it already is. Elinruby (talk) 22:54, 6 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Don't worry about a "day or two" as Tazerdadog has started a two-week countdown, so I guess you have at least that much time. I thought we were already *in* the two-week period, but after a year's worth of working on this (S Marshall, him, you, et al; I've only been here a month or so) two more weeks won't make any difference. So I withdraw the Tuesday thing, and let's go with Tazerdadog's two-week period. Will that do it, for you? 00:57, 7 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Oops, just saw your call for 30 days, I'm just trying to please everybody, and it's not working. I'll go with whatever time period everyone else is happy with. I originally thought we were in the two-week period already which just expired, so 2 days more was good enough for me. If two weeks isn't enough, and you think a month would do it, I'm certainly not going to stand in the way of that. I'd just *really* like to feel confident that we won't be taking it all up again, on June 6. (D-Day! Not sure if that's a good omen or not ;-) ) I'm good with June 6, if Elinruby is, and if we can keep S Marshall from committing harakiri in desperation with fine, Sheffield steel just long enough to see the end of this. Can we just assure him, "This time for sure!" ? If so, then I'm on board for 30 days, but if this is going to go on indefinitely, or get discussed and postponed again, then I'd be grumpy about that. In a way, we are renegotiating the outcome of an already decided Rfc, which isn't entirely fair (especially to S Marshall, who has been the poster boy of patience), but it's taken us so long to get here, that hopefully if a month works for you and everyone, and we're not talking about reopening discussion on this, then I'm okay with it. OTOH, if S Marshall *does* object, then I'd have to change my view, if only to respect the outcome of the Rfc. Mathglot (talk) 01:12, 7 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I almost forgot: this was mentioned elsewhere by TZD, so I have to ask you, Elinruby: you are using ~~strikeout~~ type on the article title of any article in the list you wish to vaccinate against nuking, correct? That's certainly what I've been doing, for the ones I wish to save. Or are you using another indicator? Mathglot (talk) 01:16, 7 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Two weeks will be enough time for me. but I only look at ones that interest me, as do most others, and there seem to be whole topic areas that are not being much looked at: sports & popular music, for example. We may need to get additional reviewers. I understand the frustration of those working on it from the first, but it's typical of WP that others don't get interested until near the end. I notice that little seems to have been worked on between 1050 and 2300, and the section work on most intensively, the first 100, about 80 out of the 100 have been marked for keeping or keeping for improvement. DGG ( talk ) 01:20, 7 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot: I thought @DGG: said 30 days but I see he was not specific about how long. My bad. Two weeks is enough to for me as well to get some stuff done, whether it is *enough* depends on the goal. What's the milestone? But I have looked at or worked on many of these articles already and now I look I see I only have 800-1000 and 3000-3500 (or whatever the end is) to go in this pass. So yes, I can make some blanket statements about these articles by two weeks from now, firm. In fact I will make a couple now to get us staranrted. Separately, I think, to increase readability.

Doing something about all of the blanket statements may or may not be possible by then -- but I can promise to have all articles as kill/care/don't care/questions by then, yes, if that helps. As for S Marshall, he has been quite civil when he discusses, I will give him that, but if he is sick of working on the list I don't see why he doesn't just walk away, is one issue I am having here when you try to evoke sympathy for him. Is he assigned to this task somehow? I have been here, very active on wikipedia, doing translation work, for that entire year and more. Just saying. A raft of people at WP:PNT still don't know about this list, although some of the entries on it wound up over there and some of those people for all we know are working on some of these articles right now. I formally subit that we do some sort of proposal (RfC or whatever the paperwork requires) after we are done with this, to rationalize the very broken translation process. The only reason we even know about this is that the RfC bot picked me for something George Ho was working on that was on this board. That's really not ok and imho should not happen again, whether we need to create a list or a project or whatever the freaking template is to fix that. People working on translation should have input on policies that affect translation. I did want to address "can effortlessly be re-created" idea that is floating around. The tool does not work that way and does not machine translate at all going into english, people. It;s simply a structured IDE and no you don't effortlessly push a button. I am glad nothing is gettin salted -- that was one thing I was worried about -- but as matters now stand if I use the tool to create an article it can be deleted on sight at the discretion of any admin. Say what? I have met admins with some really strange ideas. I am just a humble hardworking translator but I know what I am doing and some of my better work was on this list. It cuts both ways. Nobody likes being Sisyphus. Specific suggestions below Elinruby (talk) 02:21, 7 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Elinruby: A couple of things: most of this is just due to the fact that WP is a volunteer project, so no real chiefs to tell you what to do, nobody to fire you, nobody you can tell what to do, and just a bunch of tribal councils to try to get people to move more or less in the same direction, which as often as not, is a big muddle (somewhat like now). I'm sometimes surprised that it works as well as it does; as they say: "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." As for sympathy: I guess I feel sympathy for everybody, precisely because it is a volunteer project, and people are giving freely of their time and themselves for what they consider something worthwhile to others. I know that you are, and so is S Marshall, DGG, TZD, and everybody else.

As to the bigger questions about translation, they definitely exist and should be addressed, but nobody will hear you here. Bottom line, this page is all about a bunch of articles that got created via machine translation when a WMF person flipped a config bit the wrong way on the CXT tool, and the resulting flood of MT articles, created mostly by monolinguals and to a certain extent even by banned sockpuppets, which has been distracting you, me, and everybody else ever since. You, more than me, because you were the one (I think) who told me about this list. So, let's just try and get this done, in a month if that's what works for you. Then, we can put our heads together and think about the translation process. I don't think you'd have a lot of disagreement with it being broken, but that's not a topic for here :-) . Let's get this stuff tagged (you're ~~striking~~ to mark "keep", right?), nuked, and be done with it! Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 02:37, 7 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

OK so let's get these glitches cleaned up and freaking start a discussion about how to do this better because this is maddening. The translation policies are obsolete and nobody but nobosy is going to keep re-creating articles because someone who can't assess the content of an article made an assumption about the difficulty of the task based on an erroneous policy that was talking about some antique version of a completely different tool and where machine translation is by definition gibberish. X2 needs to have an end date at a minimim and just for a start. Elinruby (talk) 02:46, 7 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Just an FYI in response to my ping: yes, WP:PNT was notified of CXT. That post is in the PNT archives now. I have actually never given this a good look, since it was such a huge an daunting list. I'll see if there is something interesting in it for me. --HyperGaruda (talk) 05:30, 7 Mayf 2017 (UTC)

@HyperGaruda: alright. If you say so -- apparently I missed a memo. Just curious, do you remember when this was? As for help, please do. We've been trying to annotate to make it a bit easier to look. And I am telling anyone who will listen that I *really* need eyes at Impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, left summary on talk page there earlier if that helps anyone. Meanwhile thank you for the answer Elinruby (talk) 08:05, 7 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Elinruby: looking at the signatures in said post, I'd say mid-June 2016. By the way, I did not realise there were still a lot of X2-eligible entries in the CXT list; my inner deletionist is dancing with joy :) I think I will temporarily shift my attention from PNT to CXT for a few weeks. --HyperGaruda (talk) 12:19, 7 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@HyperGaruda: Please do. There is some Greek, Arabic and Latin stuff here that could use your eyes. Elinruby (talk) 00:48, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Translated from Simple

Just noticed @S Marshall:'s comment at #40 Adolphe-Marie_Hardy, "Translated" from the Simple English Wikipedia. I presume this was a test edit of some kind.". I had tagged a couple others from Simple, I'll list them here in case we want any different handling for them.

40. Adolphe-Marie_Hardy
1583. Tracey_Packham
1747. ~~M._K._A._D._S._Gunawardana~~ - significantly expanded and good enough to keep, so struck
2529. Family_Portrait_(Kralj)

Mathglot (talk) 23:35, 5 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

proposal for regex criteria

I don't care wbat we use but here is what I have been doing for purposes of cooperative editing. I am open to anything we can for crissakes agree upon of people want to use something else.

Strikeout -- historically, on this list, it has meant Keep this, yes. That is my understanding I generally annotate a reason, ie "very nice cryptology article" for example. I also usually sign in case someone disagrees.

At one point we were concurring with one another, and then I think we all saw one too many villages in Yemen with 12 inhabitants.and wandered off. I really do appreciate the amount of crud tho and I have the courage of my convictions; I am tryign to help

Not struck out, no annotation - do not at the moment have an opinion. There are several categories that nobody is working on at the moment. presumably if line is blank then as a group we don't know. These are where we need to get the decision-making.
Not struck out, annotation can be either that this is really bad or that the article falls into some category that someone was apparently trying to fill out ie Olympic medalists or Prelates of Goa or *whatever*

I have identified several categories I am not happy about nuking or keeping. I will make a separate post; (edit conflict)
we need to agree on clear sign that the article has been determined to require the use of photon torpedos. "kill"? maybe?
annotaion that needs copy edit -- we should set some minimum standard suggest "help" as the string. I have not done this consistently but could make it happen
grumpy comments about article <----these need to be resolved.

Let's see what people think of this for a start, eh guys? Elinruby (talk) 03:40, 7 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Strikeout = keep – (echoing Elinruby's first sentence above, "Strikeout -- historically, on this list, it has meant Keep this, yes." Everything after that is interesting, but not needed by the regex guys.) Everything not struck means delete, regardless of commentary. If you want it kept, the title should look like this: ~~Marsupials of Enceladus~~.
Mathglot (talk) 20:01, 7 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed. Strikeout = keep. No need for a sign that it needs deleting, because on 6 June, if not struck out, kill it with fire.—S Marshall T/C 21:38, 7 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

alright. Possibly the comments are useful to anyone else that is looking though, eh? But fine, I can work with that. Elinruby (talk) 00:43, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

To the extent that anyone else is looking, ;-). Btw, a discussion touching on similar topics regarding strikeout is at WP:AN#X2 countdown and vaccinate indicators. Mathglot (talk) 06:08, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot: just to make sure we are all on the same page, that wound up agreeing to the same markup right? Elinruby (talk) 11:47, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Elinruby: Right. To keep an article, place the article title in ~~strikeout type~~. Mathglot (talk) 18:09, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Elinruby and S Marshall: Also, it is not necessary to strike anything in User space, as these will automatically be kept, irrespective of whether or not they are struck, as long as they carry the 'User:' prefix leading off the title. Adding strike tags does not hurt, but has no effect on user space articles. Mathglot (talk) 08:30, 9 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@S Marshall, Elinruby, Cryptic, DGG, No such user, and HyperGaruda: In addition, Tazerdadog has confirmed that it's not necessary to strike out Userspace items, or any items outside main (article) space, as they will be skipped over and not deleted, regardless of markings. 18:41, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

groups of hard-to-categorize articles

Medina of Tunis - topic is unquestionably notable but there are many articles on individual souks and madressas, and one on the palaces that is essentially a gallery. @Mortee: proposed a merge but the authors of the articles feel the landmarks are individually notable. I am inclined to agree but feel the articles should be fleshed out if we go that as each individual article in most cases is quite sparse as to text, although there are many images. Another possibility is gallery or category pages at wikimedia commons maybe?
Several hundred articles about athletes, many olympians and national champions, often little more than a list of medals or wins -- is this considered ok for an athlete's article? I really have no idea how to proceed with these.

--in case anyone cares about this besides me, the notability standard says anyone with at least a bronze is notable. But does that mean they automatically get an article and is just a list of medals and wins enough?

Oodles of models, actors and actresses and television personalities from many countries - these are almost always challenged for notability in my experience, and x2 says they can be deleted on sight so why bother?
lots of artists, again, almost always challenged for notability, seems pointless to work on this given x2

Elinruby (talk) 07:11, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

also a bunch of sports stadiums, in which I have zero interest - do we need these articles and who can assess them?
what's the rule on villages in the ukraine and Tunisia and Yemen and so on? Some of these have like 12 people Elinruby (talk) 10:42, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Notability issues will get more eyeballs elsewhere. At the same time that X2 articles are deletable for the CXT misconfig reason, even if they avoid X2 deletion they are still subject to deletion for all the regular reasons, non-notability being a biggie. So I would say, if you think the translation is accurate and the article isn't obviously a clear delete for other reasons, then go ahead and strike them, and move your comments about notability or merge issues to somewhere more likely to get the kind of feedback you want, like the talk pages of the individual articles, or perhaps a relevant WikiProject where the delete discussion for non-X2 reasons can take place.

That said, as I've been going through articles, if I see something that seems clearly a candidate for speedy or regular deletion, I've {{Prod}}ed it, or nominated it for deletion. If I'm already there looking at some 1-sentence, unreferenced article, sometimes I'd just rather get it over with and {{Prod}} it, since I know I'll probably never run across it again, and if someone is seriously interested in creating it, it's trivial to do so. So if you want to get involved with the notability issues for any of these articles, I'd say go for it, but this isn't the right venue.

There is one other thing you could do to raise the visibility of an article, wrt notability or other issues other than start a Talk page discussion about it, which is to tag the article with {{db-x2}}, which might bring some interested eyeballs to it, to respond to the notability or other issues. Mathglot (talk) 17:53, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

translated template

btw shouldn't we be putting translated on all translation? So definitely on the ones that are being struck right? or can that be machine added later? In the same script that nukes the ones we don't maybe? Elinruby (talk) 11:30, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Somebody should be. The {{translated page}} template (or validly worded Edit summary, but that ship has sailed) is *required* on translated pages. (It's not a guideline, not a policy, but a core WMF requirement for copyright/legal reasons of attribution of translated articles.) That said, unless you're willing to step up and vouch for someone else's translation, I would not do it, because I wouldn't want my name being associated with something that's false (if that's what it is). In a way, this is actually a *great* reason to not keep an article, namely: if you're looking at a translated article, and you don't feel confident enough to attach your name to the {{translated page}} badge on the article, then it should be deleted under X2. Mathglot (talk) 18:03, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I am putting the template where I do though, just for funsies. Some of them have notations that they are based on the Bulgarian wikipedia article or whatever, and I can't always verify that, of course -- but I am leaving it Elinruby (talk) 11:24, 10 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Ban on db-x2?

From this message on my TP by DGG, I would conclude that we are not allowed to tag articles with {{db-x2}} for two weeks. Is that correct? If so, I am having a hard time finding that decision here. Could someone lead me to the right section please? --HyperGaruda (talk) 20:32, 9 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

section 12.

Not that I can see why anyone would want to remove material thant hafd not been checked, when of the parts that have been checked, we're keeping about 3/4 of them. Befoe the screening started, the estimate of those worth keep was much lower, and, had that proven to be the case, it might have made sense to delete them all. But it appears that the impetus for the project was not a realization of the actual content of the articles as a whole, but an emphasis on a few undoubtedly bad examples (though even a few of these have now been marked for rescue).

Personally, I think the concern was unrealistic from the start. Most translated articles were utterly straightforward simple bio or geographical articles, and machine translation can manage them. Another large group were from the scandinavian languages, and machine translation from those works very well also, because of the similarities in syntax. I don't even think there was any reason to expect these translations to have a higher error rate than those articles written originally in English by the half of our contributors for whom it is not a native language.

I am a little uncomfortable trying to set my experience as a librarian with only a basicknowwledge of other languages against that of experienced translators and linguists . But WP is intended to be written by amateurs, not professionals, and this necessarily implies the acceptance of a certai namount of error. After all, WP has never claimed to be a reliable resource--though we all agree it should be as accurate as feasible within our limitations. DGG ( talk ) 20:37, 9 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I did tag one or two {{db-x2}}'s, I will stop if told not to. Personally, I can much more readily accept errors by human amateurs than I can those by computer programs. After all, we expect errors from humans, and they can be held accountable if necessary, but in reality another human simply comes along and just improves it. When it's a computer translation, the person installing the computer edit doesn't really feel responsible for it ("It wasn't me, it was google!") and many others may think that machine translation must be right, and are loathe to challenge it. Or rather, they do change it, but simply to correct the errors of English grammar or stilted "machine" style, putting a pretty coat of paint on it and freezing it in place, thus covering up any errors of fact due to the machine translation, perhaps forever, with unknown errors lurking, and a pretty "translated page" badge on the Talk page that is a lie.

I don't understand how one could say that the Scandinavian translations work very well, or have higher, or lower, error rates than any others, unless one knows the language, except of course for the case of errors in English grammar and style, which I find relatively unimportant to this X2 task since anybody can fix those and there's no particular urgency about it, that can happen well after the deadline. What I'm concerned with, is the errors of fact that occur in machine translation (or poor human translation) that come out wrong, that is to say, that get the facts wrong, though the English be perfect.

As I go through this list, I am allowing articles with a certain level of stilted grammar and style to be kept (striking the title) if the translation is factually correct. Conversely, I am allowing other articles in beautifully crafted English to be deleted, when it's clear that the translation is factually wrong, even if some editors have come by later and painted over the English errors but not the factual ones, which they can't if they don't know the language.

Maybe it's all a matter of what kind of "error" you're willing to accept, and I guess I'm favoring factual accuracy much higher than proper English, and relying on two things: the guideline of verifiability and the (legal) requirement of attribution, where a translated article must (not "should") be attributed for copyright reasons, using {{translated page}} or certain formulaic edit summaries. (This is similar to the WP:CWW requirement.) A sentence translated incorrectly in fact, is ipso facto unverifiable, and so is also contrary to the attribution requirement, because you cannot attribute to a copyright holder, something that they never said. I do give a hoot about grammar and style (actually, lots of hoots) but it is not primary for me, in considering translated articles.

Correctness of fact is top of the pile, as far as what is motivating to accept, or reject, a particular article. I am *not* deleting articles which are not referenced, not verified (yet), or even hoaxes, fringe theories or any other speedy criterion. If I get a hoax article that is properly translated into English, then it passes, and gets a strike, because X2 doesn't cover that, something else does. (If I have the time, and feel like it, I might go look up a speedy reason and go with that, but mostly I'm not doing that, and only concentrating on factual accuracy of translation.) Because of this, I only will examine articles translated from languages I feel competent to judge, because how in the world could I know if a Farsi or Chinese language article was translated properly? Beautiful English counts for next to nothing, as far as I'm concerned. "Just the facts, ma'am; nothing but the facts."

If I'm doing it the wrong way, then someone needs to let me know. If it's mostly about proper English, you don't really need translators here, and I can go spend the time somewhere where I'd be more effective, like the batch of Catalan or German articles that need looking over. But I feel this is useful and accomplishing something; at least, I hope so. Mathglot (talk) 03:59, 10 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that we're concerned with factual inaccuracy, not proper English. The point of X2 is to remove a particular kind of inaccuracy, that from mistranslation. If they are not obviously and blatantly inaccurate, speedy is not a valid criterion--anything disputable is not a speedy.(as an example where I do not think speedy applies, if a translation converts the tenses wrong, but so as they can be easily straightened out, they can be straightened out--it's no different from any other bad English. But if it gets them so much wrong or the sequence of events is so complicated that the article needs to be retranslated, as can easily happen with an historical article, than the article should be removed, unless someone retranslates it. of it nobody retranslates it.Just as we accept amateur writing, whcih can also get sources wrong through misunderstanding, so we can accept amateur translating. In fact, even badly wrong translating is much easier to fix than misunderstanding that requires re-examing the osurces.)

I agree we're not primarily concerned with notability , except that if the article is unlikely to stand in the enWP, there's no point translating it; we're also to some extent concerned with importance, because if it isn't important enough , there's no point working on it if there's so much else to do.

I accept your judgment of how bad a translation is. Tell me, how many of the ones you examined have been truly translation errors that affect the meaning of significance or comprehensibility of the article? Having worked on them, what do you think the proportion is?

If you think I or others have been too reckless, then what;s needed is more time to go carefully. DGG ( talk ) 05:05, 10 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

That's a really interesting question that I've wondered about myself, and a tough judgment call. Seems like I'd need more data to answer it properly, too; because some days I seem to be on a strike-streak, keeping things left and right (like yesterday especially, which must've been 70-80% keep, way higher than my average day), and other days much less so. To some extent, the variations of feeling the pressure of an impending deadline, or not feeling it so much, can affect how much time I feel I have on individual articles, which may affect my call; not ideal of course, but it comes back to the fact that we're all volunteers, and human to boot.

No one likes their work deleted, and I have, in the back of my mind, the memory of what it's like to have my work come to naught when an article is deleted (not very often, thankfully) and it's not a pleasant feeling by any means; though I try to rationalize it as much as possible as the decision as having been made by consensus, and thus correct, and putting the "blame" on myself, as much as I can, for not having chosen a more suitable article to edit. Still, it's a disappointment, so before I decide to leave an article open to X2 deletion, I look carefully at the rev history, and if it looks like someone has really been slaving over something, but the translation still looks X2-deletable, then in a few cases I've placed notices on the major contributor's talk page inviting them to move the article to their user drafts, and linking to WP:UD in case they don't know what that is. If there are very few significant content-edits in the history then I feel less compunction about leaving it to be deleted.

I *do* worry about articles being deleted that will disappoint people that have worked on them, and I wish I had time to notify everyone of that risk before it happens, so they could userify them, if they wanted. OTOH, for me, the quality of the encyclopedia as a whole takes precedence over individual ruffled feelings, and I'm very much motivated by the attribution requirement and all that that implies, and I'm very averse to keeping translations that are just (factually) wrong, so as long as a delete seems clearly X2-justified, then I feel okay about it.

It's also a case-by-case thing; I don't always find the smoking-gun of transgarbling facts where the guy is married to the wrong person, or it wasn't that battle it was another, or it's not important it's big (a typical French error), sometimes I'll find one, but sometimes I won't, but in the latter case sometimes the nature of the poor English text plus the rev history make it clear that it's a mostly unedited MT, and at that point, I'll consider length, complexity and subject matter (like you've stated somewhere earlier) and if it's some fairly straightforward BLP stub about a Catalonian politician or a French javelin thrower, well, then there's not too much opportunity for the MT to screw up the facts very badly, and even if the English is stilted, I'll let it stay anyway after a quick read-through of the original and the English, without really doing a line-by-line fact check, because anything factually wrong will jump out at me. OTOH, if it's something complex on the order of Classis Germanica (not on the PTR list) and there's all sorts of complex syntax in the original, or it's densely loaded with facts, and all sorts of things that can be confused and gotten wrong, then I'll try to find a smoking gun, or at least some brush fires, and make a judgment call. The trickier cases are the ones with really good English, because then you have to avoid being seduced by the glossy English and look under the hood to make sure it's not a leaky engine with a blown gasket that has been steam-cleaned just before you got there, and know how to check for that.

So it's really not an easy thing that we're doing, and we just all have to trust each other to do it as well as we can, given that we're all motivated by the same thing, namely to improve the encyclopedia. I can certainly see how some of us might be more "inclusionist" or more,—what would be the opposite, accuracy/citation-anal?— but we're all basically pulling in the same direction and muddling through as best we can. I'm more the latter than the former, Elinruby is probably more the former than the latter, but we all want the same thing ultimately; we're just trying to arrive there by different routes, which seems to be what it's all about at WP anyway, so I'm fine with it. Sorry, I know this was rambling, not to mention a wall of text; your question and comment are really good (they always are, I've noticed) and maybe deserve a better discussion forum than here, when this is all over.

But to end with your original question about more time: this has already been extended twice, and I think the current June 6 date is motivating and helps us to keep focused and working towards that date. I fear that extending it again at this point, while it might help churn out more decisions were we robots, might instead cause dismay or discouragement and lead us to slack off or give up. It's been over a year, a great example of discussion and consensus among various editors with diverse views to get to this point imho, but I feel we just have to stick to this date, now, and do the best we can. Recall that the admins will stage the deletes into a quarantine area for a certain time, so even a "deleted" article won't be gone on D-Day, you can still reach in and snatch it back from a fate worse than Prod. So, you can think of the nuke operation as putting them on double secret probation; they're not quite dead, but they're in a lot of trouble. ;-) Mathglot (talk) 19:51, 10 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think you meant to say that I'm not concerned with accuracy but in case anyone is inclined to read it that way, let me just put this on the record: my training and experience is in large part in journalism so I won't put or leave anything in an article that I know or even suspect is wrong. (Except when WP makes me: grumble, Impeachment of Dilma Rousseff). I just don't necessarily always require a footnote if something seems accurate. I realize this is not broadly applicable as a standard and don't advocate that it become one, because not everyone knows what they don't know; I've spent many years translating en=>fr and especially fr=>en though and it works for me. I try for footnotes in what I write myself (usually pretty technical) but footnotes in existing articles don't require language skills and not everyone can verify a statement based on an occitan or creole text, is all. I try to put my time on stuff other people can't do. I do think I am an inclusionist, but in part because the things that delight me are pretty nerdy so I am wary of saying that nobody could possibly care about say the genetics of viticulture or bantu language dialects. All really interesting stories (Operation Car Wash, Panama Papers) are rooted in some really dry facts. I have started and erased a number of comments to this thread; on the assessment side I just want to note that what is jarring to an english reader ("its" referring to a person for example) sometimes stems from differences in grammar -- in a lot of languages gender comes from the word not its object. Sa fleur could mean his/her/its flower; it is feminine because flower is feminine in french. So while that sort of thing is ugly and I fix it where I see it, it's not necessarily important, unless there's an out and out mistranslation over it. I have marked a couple of articles as kill because instead of X influencing Y, Y influenced X and you can't trust anything with an error like that, so it needs to go unless I care enough about it to go over each and every fine detail. I do quite a few really messy articles with non-English speakers so I don't emote over this stuff though; it's accurate or it is not. If I can't understand it, and I am really good at understanding bad text, then it needs to be fixed.

I am operating here from a) do we need it b) can we read it c) is it right and d) if not can I, or will I, fix it 04:13, 11 May 2017 (UTC)

I don't think anybody will assume that, and they can just go look at the (pretty amazing) Talk page at Dilma to see how assiduous you are about getting it right. I'm actually only doing b, c and d from your list above, for this X2 review. 'A' is notability, and I'm punting on that, as a non-X2 concern. We're basically doing the same thing. Mathglot (talk) 09:14, 11 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

it's just triage for time. Had stuff I had worked on deleted as non-notable, which was annoying as I didn't care about it to begin with. Elinruby (talk) 09:23, 11 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

We all know that feeling. Which is why I'm a little more careful now, and if I think something's close to the non-notability line, I'll avoid it, for exactly that reason. Mathglot (talk) 09:27, 11 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yes but notability challenges are frequently arbitrary and based whether a random new page patroller has heard of the topic. Apart from this week, I usually avoid all biography for this reason so it's more dysfunctional than you seem to think. Elinruby (talk) 22:49, 11 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Languages and editor recruitment

I do not see anyone editing this list that claims any knowledge of Chinese, Japanese, or Gujarati.

There are also many articles in Arabic and Persian

We could use someone who actually speaks Spanish or Portuguese.

Elinruby (talk) 11:19, 10 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

As far as Asian languages, there are some Categories of language speakers and some Projects we could maybe use to recruit speakers to help out. Hong Kong folks tend to be bilingual zh-en, a lot of Singaporeans, too. I notice a sprinkling of Armenian and Georgian, we could try some of those categories/lists/projects, too. Finally, there are just going to be some articles that we can't do anything about; but that reflects Wikipedia as a whole. If someone uses MT to translate something from Georgian Wikipedia without having a clue, and there's nobody here that does either, well, then the right result is to delete the article. I can handle Spanish and Portuguese, and I'm assessing and tagging those as I come across them. If you have particular es/pt questions, ping me to the item, or on my talk page. Here are some resources:

Regional Notice boards: Nav template Arabic speakers Singapore
WikiProjects:
- WikiProject Intertranswiki: Arabic Chinese Japanese Persian
- WikiProject Hong Kong - Chinese speakers
- WikiProject Iran
- WikiProject Japan
- WikiProject Singapore - more Chinese speakers
Translator categories: cs cy el es fa ka gu he hi hr ja pl pt ro ru sv th tr zh
Wikimedia Embassy: Arabic Chinese Czech Farsi Greek Gujarati Hebrew Hindi Japanese Polish Russian Turkish Welsh

Mathglot (talk) 20:54, 10 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

that helps -- maybe I will put some time into recruitment today. I hear you on Georgian but that doesn't seem to be one of the languages. I do understand that this is an example. We could also use some Greek and Bulgarian tho. Elinruby (talk) 01:43, 11 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Elinruby: So far there are two articles from Georgian that have been identified in the list:

1819. Tao-Klarjeti (historical region), and:
1966. Basiani

but I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for a Georgian editor to swing by, there's a grand total of one of them on the project. But what the heck, it would be wild if they could help out with those two articles. But doing recruitment isn't a bad idea; if we all got one more editor to help out, esp. with the Asian languages, that would really help a lot.

P.S. Have taken the liberty to adjust the section title above to better reflect this (feel free to revert if not happy with the change). Mathglot (talk) 06:04, 11 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hindi, Bengali

Please welcome User:Winged Blades of Godric, who has been helping evaluate Bengali and Hindi articles for the project. Thanks, Winged Blades! Mathglot (talk) 05:00, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

hurray hurray Elinruby (talk) 06:37, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Gujarati

Thanks to User:Nizil Shah who helped evaluate some Gujarati articles, and also pointed out some by KartikMistry. They are both Gujarati speakers, and I will be marking these articles, and any other Gujarati articles I come across that are created or improved by either of them as "keepers" for this project.

Thanks, Kirtik and Nizil! Please feel free to scan the list of all 3602 articles at WP:CXT/PTR, to see if you can find any other Gujarati articles that have not been evaluated by anyone so far. Mathglot (talk) 06:03, 27 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Mathglot, List:

Articles created by me:461, 477, 489, 585, 1207, 1208, 1209, 1210, 1211, 1361, 2504, 2505, 2506, 2507, 2508, 2530, 2531, 2532, 2533, 2528, 2530, 2531, 2532, 2533, 2542, 2545, 2546, 2569, 2575, 2602, 2692, 2695, 2696, 2697, 2705, 2719, 2851, 2852, 2853, 2854, 2960, 2961
created by Kartik:1570, 2088

All above articles created by me are manually translated. Articles by Kartik are also OK. Also strike down those three articles too. Regards,-Nizil (talk) 06:36, 27 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Perfect, working on it, thanks! Mathglot (talk) 06:57, 27 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Nizil: Okay, should be all done, now. Also found one more: #2576 Baldhoi, which is one of yours as well. Thanks for your assistance! Mathglot (talk) 07:41, 27 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Just for record there was no Machine Translation available from Gujarati->English anytime (even during misconfiguration of MT)! I can find list of languages from where MT was enabled accidently if you want :) --Kartik Mistry ^talk 12:38, 27 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Kartik, I did not know that, that's good to know. Yes, if it's not too difficult to find out the list of languages for which MT was accidentally enabled, that would be very helpful to us. Thanks! Mathglot (talk) 16:23, 27 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Mathglot Here is list of languages from where 'MT' was accidently enabled.

ca
cy
eo
es
eu
gl
is
sh

You should only check articles from these languages for possible use of MT. --Kartik Mistry ^talk 17:33, 27 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@KartikMistry: Kartik, thanks for the list. That kind of mystifies me a little, when I look at lists like this one (alternate view of same data, here), so I guess it will have to remain a mystery. Mathglot (talk) 03:27, 28 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Let me have a look into this list --Kartik Mistry ^talk 06:19, 28 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@KartikMistry: Only if you wish to for your own reasons. Whatever the outcome, it will not affect us here, so no need to look into it on our account. Mathglot (talk) 08:39, 28 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! --Kartik Mistry ^talk 03:04, 29 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Also 1466. Mathglot (talk) 09:49, 1 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Nizil Shah and KartikMistry:Nizil, how would you rate your level of English? I went ahead and tagged as "keepers" all the articles corresponding to your list above. But I was looking at #509, Himanshi_Shelat and the English is pretty rough, with some missing indefinite and definite articles (the words a, an, and the), and some errors in subject/pronoun gender accord, such as: "She received [an award] in 1996 for his short story collection...". I know you're manually translating, but when I do that, I still use Google just to save having to type all the words, then I fix it up. If you're doing that too, just to start these articles off in English, please remember to go over the result from beginning to end and edit it. Although these faults are not very pretty, still I'm not very worried about them as they don't hinder understanding, and any editor could fix them up, no need to know Gujarati. What really worries me, though, is the possibility that the translation might totally get the facts wrong, but the English right, in a way that as a non-Guajarati speaker like myself would not be able to catch. That's the most important thing to examine.

So, if you could take another look at Himanshi Shelat and fix up pronouns and a/an/the problems, that would be great; but even more important, if you could do a side-by-side comparison of it with the Gujarati article and make sure the English isn't getting the facts wrong, I'd appreciate it. Mathglot (talk) 22:48, 1 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I've started fixing it. Thanks! --Kartik Mistry ^talk 03:16, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot:, forgive me for my English grammar. Especially I frequently miss indefinite and definite articles. I don't use Google translate at all. I am sure that these articles don't have wrong facts as they are translated manually. I need to improve my grammar. :( Thank you. --Nizil (talk) 05:58, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@NizilShah: Hi, Nizil, thanks for that clarification; and no need to apologize at all for anything. Your efforts here are very much appreciated. Now that you've clarified that the facts are fine, don't worry at all about the articles or subj/verb/object accord; any monolingual editor can clear those up via simple copyediting, you don't need to do that. Sounds like your native or near-native Gujarati speaker, and that's what is important. Thanks again.! Mathglot (talk) 06:11, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Should I nuke this one, or not?

@S Marshall, Elinruby, HyperGaruda, DGG, Cryptic, and Yngvadottir: Need some help from you guys. Should I nuke *this article*, or not? I think it might be MT, but I'm not completely sure. Can you help? Cast your vote below. Mathglot (talk) 05:26, 12 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Keep (as nom) - the English looks clear, completely understandable; so why not keep it. Mathglot (talk) 05:35, 12 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

is there a rule on villages?

A lot of stubs that might reflect the fact that they are on a list of administrative districts of yemen, or something like that. I think they are a bit sparse to just have them hang out like that though. A few of them have been expanded a little to say there was a massacre or something there, which makes it notable although in that case shouldn't there be an article about that event? Anyway, there are a couple hundred like that on this list Elinruby (talk) 01:39, 20 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Since all villages for which there is any documentation at all have always been kept at WP, there is no point deleting these. The policy behind it is that WP is also a gazetteer. But I usually don't see the point of keeping ones where there is no documentation at all, or just a map location. DGG ( talk ) 08:18, 28 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

forts of x

there are about 30 like this; though their title may not usually take that form. I'll start making a list, I guess, as DGG and I have been striking them. They are all, no question, notable... whether they are *this* notable for en.wikipedia is a question for which I would like to enlist an editor with a background in military history, method to be determined. Taking suggestions for applicable wikiprojects and portals and so on. Elinruby (talk) 22:30, 21 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Colvale Fort (Goa) needs a small c/e - did the small c/e and struck it Elinruby (talk) 16:02, 30 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

-there are 5-6 more in the area of Goa and Gujarat — Preceding unsigned comment added by Elinruby (talk • contribs) 23:08, 21 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Forts in France - I have seen about a dozen very long and detailed articles on named forts in the vicinity of Metz; many of these had extensive fortification put in for WW2, and since Metz is in Alsace these buildings are probably significant indeed for the French-Prussian squabble over the place, not to mention trench warfare in WW1. I have previously seen and worked on many very extensive articles about military fortifications in Paris and also near as I recall Amiens and someplace in the south, perhaps Bayonne. Point is, someone is working on documenting them all apparently and I am all for the French national and regional governments documenting these archaeological sites on wikipedia. That said I am already booked into the next century with orders for French translation and moreover don't know anything more about military history and tactics than you learn in the state-run lycée system in France, tho that is *something* considering the history of France. Bottom line -- I am striking these articles and am not attempting at the moment to rewrite them for focus or anything. Some of them need an edit for guidebook tone but for the most part these are not bad translation (tho some of those I've seen elsewhere than on this list were kinda bad, but they had also been up for years). Surely some professor would be delighted to tidy these up and maybe add some references. The ones I looked at did have some, but not really enough, and were missing the really interesting parts of the history (how does one die of apoplexy in a pond for example). However the French government has extensive ancient records on all sorts of things so the articles can be added to later n can always change, right; most historical objects and monuments are well-documented in online databases as well and the Bibiothèque Nationale has a LOT of 18th century monographs and such online as well. So sources will not be an issue. (later) there is a whole category for these, and no, not all of these are on this list, but enough are that deleting the articles would be ... well. Everyone here knows what I think of the whole proposal. But yes, there are many many many articles about French military fortifications, 27 articles for the ones in Paris alone. Elinruby (talk) 06:06, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Also on this list: I have seen some forts up near Pas-de-Calais as well. Strike all french forts is what I am on right now. There is all kinds of content and it's accurate — Preceding unsigned comment added by Elinruby (talk • contribs) 04:29, 23 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Fort de la Duchere
{{Category:Fortifications_of_Lyon|Fortifications of Lyon}}

Fort de Bron - Lyon

we may possibly want to merge them, but they would normally be kept if they were in the US or UK. As this is a preliminary screen it's better to keep them, and then decide. The eventual decision should involve people interested in the topic, not just the few of us here. There ought to be a wealth of historical data available, as for any military subject--sometimes the frWP articles seem just a sketch, but there should always be enough to expand. DGG ( talk ) 08:21, 28 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I have played enough with articles about French archaeology and the Crusaders and Provence in the Dark Ages to assure you that the Bibliothèque Nationale maintains extensive websites, databases and catalogs that cover each and every silver salver, mosaic, and painting in every historic site and ruined monastery or hermitage. (persee.fr for instance is theirs I think)...and then there are the journals, which are frequently available full-text if they are old enough. Not all of this is available in English but that is not an issue for me and there are 2-3 others here with French proficiency, just off the top of my head. The ones in Goa and the Baltic I have not examined that closely but I am pretty sure they weren't stubs. But the French articles I have looked at cover the city walls as archaeology because they usually have traces of several, many of them previously excavated: something prehistoric, then a Roman wall, then a medieval wall, and often these were still walled cities much later than that. I just cleaned one up about the customs checkpoints in the Paris walls coming down after the Revolution. The city walls of Paris are notable --I dunno about 27 articles worth but I am sure someone cares. PS list above is incomplete. Elinruby (talk) 01:29, 11 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

There is a french article on Forts of Metz which I am translating as context. There are also articles on Fortifications of Metz and the fortified belts of Metz. I have not looked at these yet and so don't know how much duplication there is. but these are in fact somewhat separate topics. These military defenses are interesting in that they were built by the French, then taken by the Germans and further fortified, then finally taken by the Third US Army in WW2. No less than 40 German generals were born in Metz while it was held by the Germans; I thought that was interesting.

Meanwhile I built out some of the forts in India on the list a bit with categories and wikilinks. Just trying to follow up on some of the struck items and improve them. I found, incidentally, that a lot of the French articles were translated in 2015 by Endo999 and contain many misstatements of fact. I asked him about one article and we had a rather testy exchange in which he told me I could improve any article I wished but that he thought I should leave these alone and translate more articles from the French myself. I don't think an article that says there was fighting in the area in WW1 when the original in fact says there was none should be left alone. Bottom line, anything translated by Endo999 should be examined with deep suspicion as he does not seem to care about accuracy at all and I found many many many errors in his articles about French forts. And I am not done with them yet. Elinruby (talk) 23:45, 25 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

There is at least some duplication between Forts of Metz and Fortifications of Metz which I will address eventually. Right now I am cleaning up the horrendous mess in the various articles about French forts, where a single user (who has not been blocked for some reason) has in a well-meaning way perpetuated mistranslations in dozens of articles, which, well, the examples above suffice, but are only examples...Anyway, that's where I will be if someone needs me. I haven't gotten to line-by-line verification on all of them yet. But it's needed, as the translation has in many cases badly understood sentence construction and verb tense. I should also add that many of these problems do not stem from the tool -- omitting "de la" in a name, for example, is not something it would do, and although it does not carry over accents, omitting them is a spelling error in French and even if we are in English in a name the accent absolutely should have been carried over so I call carelessness and IDGAF. Elinruby (talk) 23:11, 28 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tunis Medina

I just heard on the radio that the city of Tunis is planning to use wikipedia to document the state of historic preservation in the souks and the madrasahs. This would be why they told @Mortee: they did not want to combine the articles. I wonder if someone can just verify their timetable for doing this? If the articles are going to eventually flesh out I think it's a great idea; I personally never disputed their notability, just the usefulness of many barely-there stubs. I will find a link for the news story; it was on KQED around 6pm local time, and I forget if the announcer said NPR News or PBS News.I also anticipate a learning curve there, but maby someone already has this covered; if not I strongly suggest finding someone who speaks at least some Arabic to mention what sounds like a wholebunch of new users.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/new-generation-reviving-old-heart-tunis/

I did notice that the navbar for the madrassas does not seem to have any redlinks anymore, so perhaps progress is being made. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Elinruby (talk • contribs) 04:29, 23 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Good tip; I added it to WP Portal:Tunisia. Mathglot (talk) 00:59, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Elinruby: Struck a few on your behalf, and pinged you to a few others. Not sure how much info is in the "Alert" notification you get, and also didn't want to ping you every time I found one, so please search for the term "Medinapedia" on page at WP:CXT/PTR and that should locate the ones I wanted you to have a look at. Feel free to unstrike, userfy, strike, or improve in any way you see fit. Mathglot (talk) 23:11, 28 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

painters and sculptors etc

The quality of the art articles on the list is very uneven to say the least and no question some of it is incomprehensible and should be deleted. It seems like about three editors ran amok. The good side of this is that there are a LOT of articles on polish aristocrats, dutch tibetologists and Early Modern artists in exile in Paris, und so wieder -- currently trying to see what can be salvaged here. Advise caution as some of the translation is really really really bad. But I could use help if anyone is game — Preceding unsigned comment added by Elinruby (talk • contribs) 04:29, 23 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

all those 18th century economists, mathematicians and philosophers =

....there isn't a lot of there there right now — Preceding unsigned comment added by Elinruby (talk • contribs) 04:29, 23 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Strikeout means keep it

Hi @Mortee: You're aware that striking out the title of an article means keep, right? I was looking at the #2301-2400 section and I became concerned when I saw several that are redlinked and are also struck, like: 2303 Jean-Claude_Rodet, 2314 Joseeh_Punmanlon, 2331 Portrait_of_Mrs._Stefka_Gueorgieva_Otmarova, and 2351 The_Perfection_of_the_Esperanto_Verbs. Your name is on the comment line of those, but I didn't check the rev history to see who struck them, so just checking with you to make sure. Mathglot (talk) 05:36, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot: I think of this as a list of pages that need review or action (fixing or deleting), so redlinks can be struck as "nothing more to do". Mortee (talk) 06:19, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Mortee: I believe that's a way of looking at it that doesn't conflict with what will happen on nuke-day. But it was a little startling to see at first, and had me worried for a moment there that you might have been doing strikes and kills in reverse. Given your explanation, I believe that works, since striking a deleted article is a no-op wrt nuking (just confirming that with Tazerdadog). Thanks for setting my mind at ease. Mathglot (talk) 06:25, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot: when I did my work on this page, including this striking, there was no 'nuke-day'. I see that's since been agreed to so if I were starting over I wouldn't have struck them, but, as you say, it doesn't change anything since it's the difference between deleting a page once and deleting it twice :-) Mortee (talk) 06:39, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Mortee: Gotcha; you've been at this a lot longer than I have, thanks for all your work. Why am I hearing "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" in my head after your last line above? Mathglot (talk) 06:45, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot: ha! Now I have too. Mortee (talk) 06:48, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

incidentally I stopped signing each comment as I think this was impeding readability. That ok with everyone? I still sign the ones that contain a judgment, like 'good enough", but not the ones that simply note that article is from language y, and concerns topic x. Let me know if anyone would prefer I do something other than this. Elinruby (talk) 07:15, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Elinruby: Fine by me. I also stopped signing comments that were merely informative, where I made no "keep/kill" decision. For example, if I merely added a comment like: "fr; 2kb stub about French athlete" then I don't sign. If I strike or mark "kill" then I sign. As far as impeding readability, I felt the same thing, so you may have noticed that when I do sign (and sometimes even for comments) I make them in tiny font. If you want to sign something small, then just paste this at the end of the line: <small><small>~~~~</small></small> and it won't impede readability very much. Mathglot (talk) 16:31, 27 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Souks

Hi @Elinruby:, most of the souks still await striking, I assume because you're waiting to see what happens with the merge idea. (It would appear that from the MedinaPedia project that they want to develop each of those into a full article, but that doesn't mean they couldn't be merged now and reseparated later, but just throwing that in for consideration.) If it gets close to nuke-day, were you planning to strike all the Souks, or let them die? I can do a regex search and get you a quick list of them all, if you want. Mathglot (talk) 05:36, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot: I *had* had a sort of passive-aggressive "let them die" thought -- but if these are still in progress then I withdraw my concern and think that the city of Tunis is doing a fantastic thing and that absolutely we should not get in their way.

My own opinion is now that all souks and madrassahs in Tunis should be struck and that absolutely there is a historic basis for saying they are individually notable My previous concern was that one, you know, about how they not only have to be notable but there should be some indication in the article of why this matters. Please feel free to assist in any way that strikes your fancy, and yes a list would be nice for the section above just for tracking. The article titles do not all contain a specific string, but getting the ones that so onto the list would be helpful. Right this second I am on a slightly different mission -- the art on the list -- but I'll be wikignoming around for a while tonight. Meanwhile if it's in Tunis and it's not struck that is because I didn't finish that before I quit last night. But I want to finish up with this list now.

@Mortee: just because he put some work into the merge proposal. I did start to combine them and it may be a intermediate way to go, although I discovered that many of the images need better captions and that would need to be done if we make a gallery. But for say this week I am de-prioritizing this -- I spoke up for these because I agree that the topic is important and because French so it is a place I can be useful. But if people in Tunis are working on this we should definitely touch base with them before we put a lot of work into "help" that may impede something that I think should happen. Elinruby (talk) 05:56, 24 May 2017 (UTC) Elinruby (talk) 05:56, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Elinruby: @Mathglot: I agreed that the pages should be merged and proposed it on the talk page of the main article but the consensus there was to keep the individual pages. Now there's a 'nuke-day' planned, they should be struck from this list for that reason. A deletion should go through AfD, not happen by default. Mortee (talk) 06:40, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In fact, though I haven't read the discussion about nuke-day in full, from a very quick skim it seems the main reason it was agreed to was to avoid BLP violations. I'd say most non-BLP articles should be struck from the 'nuke-day list', because that justification probably doesn't apply to them. After nuke-day kills all the potentially risky pages, we'd then have the list of 'may be poorly translated but are low-risk' pages to work through at more leisure, as I'd previously been working through this. To make that work, though, we'd need to distinguish between items struck because the page is now good and doesn't need thinking about (so shouldn't be on the post-nuke-day list either) and those that were struck to let them through the initial fire, but that still need evaluating. Mortee (talk) 06:45, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree with just about everything about that discussion -- the fragmented nature, the lack of notice to people who deal all the time with machine translation, etc etc not to mention that the very few articles on this list that are irredeemable could have been more effectively identified by looking at the edit history of the 2-3 editors who were banned for automated production of gibberish. I also think X2 needs to go away. I personally will not be translating any articles until it does, because they can then be deleted without notice. So why? Meanwhile some very good content on this list that would have been affected needs to be rescued, and it's as good a test case as any for looking at the actual numbers. Me, I don't see that many we are better off not keeping, although yes there are a few. Elinruby (talk) 06:55, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Elinruby and Mortee: As far as what to strike and what not to, what X2 was for, and how long, we are rehashing an old discussion which was already decided, and even if you wanted to reopen it, a conversation under the heading "Souks" isn't the place to have it because no one will notice it here. So I'm not going to comment on any of that here. If you want to raise that as a topic, please do, but not under this heading.

As far as the souks, I tend to agree with you Elinruby about keeping them for the reasons you stated; so just go through and strike them all, if you haven't already. Mathglot (talk) 16:45, 27 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Elinruby: Seems like there are still a bunch lower than #1700 that have not been struck. Mathglot (talk) 08:25, 28 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I have had rl intervene but do have some time to work on this now. See your talk page. Feel free to strike on my behalf Elinruby (talk) 12:01, 30 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Some thoughts about translation evaluation

This was sparked by some comments in the #Souks section regarding the evaluations we are doing on the X2 review process. I don't wish to revisit previous discussions that have already been had and decided (regardless whether I fully agreed with them or not) but I do want to comment on some things that I believe are misconceptions that seem to be floating around concerning the evaluation of items on the list. @Elinruby and Mortee:

Tl;dr version: X2 is temporary and will die; you can still work on translations and they won't get deleted; the whole design of X2 is opt-in: strike to save, or do nothing to delete; BLPs are not given any special treatment for X2 beyond what they always get; some articles with potential will get nuked but don't sweat it, they can be resurrected; we're evaluating quality of translation, not quality of English; strike to adopt: if an article is bad now but you want to work on it later, just strike it and it's yours, but don't abandon your baby; a lot of things could have been designed better if we had 20-20 hindsight but they weren't and it is what it is, let's just finish it so we can all move on.

The gory details:

Clarification: I speak American English, so when I say, "you should <something>..." it means, "one should;" i.e., "we all should." I'm addressing general principles here.)

The X2 criterion is temporary, and always was intended to be temporary. It expires at the end of this project. You don't have to lobby for its expiration, it will die automatically.

If you want to work on translations during this period, just go ahead. You don't have to wait till it's over for fear your translation will be deleted; that won't happen. Nothing you work on now is subject to deletion unless it is both on the list, and remains unstruck. There is zero chance that the souks will be deleted, for example, if you strike them. So don't worry about articles getting yanked out from under you and deleted; it can't happen. (You can also move them to User space drafts, if you prefer, and then only the redirect left behind will get nuked.)

Regarding the opt-in nature of the task (strike to save): we are not here identifying potentially risky pages that should be deleted, it's the other way round: we are identifying pages that are accurately translated, and marking them so they don't get nuked. That's why there's only one indicator needed: strikeout type means keep the article; by default, everything else is nuked so no separate indicator is needed for that. (Adding "kill" to the in-line comments is a courteous thing to do, to notify your fellow editors that they needn't look at the article again; but isn't necessary.)

This opt-in feature is an important distinction, and it's that way for a very good reason. The whole point of the project is that by definition, all of the items on the list are potentially risky by default until examined and shown to be otherwise, because they were created by users, often monolinguals, who were encouraged to use machine translation during a period when the Content Translation tool was misconfigured at installation time by WMF, and left that way for many months. This is by WMF's own admission. The tool was out there, set up wrong, and well-meaning users were flooding en-wiki with scads of rubbish. Not the users' fault, WMF set it up that way on purpose, but we are left to deal with the result. And we've been dealing with it for almost a year. That's why the default is opt-in. The reason that is a good thing, is this: Just consider how long it takes a script to create a machine translation (a few seconds? less?) and to save it to Wikipedia as an article, versus how long it takes to go through an Afd process and how many people must get involved, and for how long. This special X2 exists precisely for that reason: to save editors tons of time to put together Afd's for articles that took one person 2.4 seconds to create, and then soliciting the opinions of other translator-editors, in an attempt to gain consensus to delete it. This is a painfully bad misuse of editors' time at Wikipedia.

Could there be a down-side risk to nuking the list? Is it going to kill some articles that could some day be developed into a good article? Yes, without a doubt. But that's not necessarily a bad thing on balance. If a good article is nuked, 1. Anybody can recreate it, anytime, and 2. It's not really deleted, it's just quarantined for a spell, so if your favorite article on the list suddenly disappears, no need to panic, just go yank it back. If quarantine expires for lack of interest in the article and it's removed entirely, there's still no difficulty in recreating it; and if nobody cared in all that time to get it back, well it's just not that much of a down-side.

This process is not about BLP pages. At least, not any more than in everyday editing, where BLPs have more strict rules governing them than the average article does (just like suspected copyvios, libel, and legal threats also have stricter rules). So while evaluating an article for translation accuracy, it's wise to scrutinize BLPs even more than the others while going through the list, but not because X2 says so (it doesn't), but merely because it's a BLP. Nowhere does X2 say or imply that non-BLP pages should automatically be struck, or given a pass, or that the goal of X2 review treats non-BLP articles any differently. X2 is about evaluating translation accuracy; if you want to look at notability, verifiability, COI, copyvios, etc., on top of that, that's all to the good of the encyclopedia.

Good English is not the same as good translation. What we are doing here, is evaluating the suitability of 3,602 articles that have gone through the Content translation tool and may have been subject to machine translation for inclusion in the encyclopedia. Every article on the list is known to have gone through the Content translation tool at some point in time during the mis-config period. Some were reverted, some were redirected, some translations were expert and accurate from the beginning, some weren't and had their translations fixed up by expert translators later, some were rubbish translations that were painted over with a facade of good English so they look shiny and new but under the hood they are crap and hide falsehoods in glowing English with references that don't support the lying mistranslations, and some were rubbish translations that never got painted over, and still look ugly and fit the part. Except for the very last category, for the majority of articles, there is no sure way to tell the quality of a translated article in advance without looking at it and comparing it to the original to determine whether it is accurate. (In a two-sentence article about a javelin thrower, it doesn't take much effort or comparison to give a thumbs-up/thumbs-down; but the basic principle is the same.)

Kill vs keep default: the default is "kill" (even for non-BLPs) unless someone has a look at it, and the reason is still a good one: these pages were created in seconds, often by well-intentioned monolinguals with no way of evaluating their accuracy because they were encouraged by WMF to do so, and because if the article on a 17th century Italian mathematician gets deleted because nobody here had time to evaluate and strike it, the bar to recreate it is extremely low (how long does it take to create a one-sentence, zero-ref stub?) but the bar to delete it after this X2 project expires is rather onerous (seriously: will you commit to participating in, say, 1,400 Afd discussions and creating 250 of them? How about 80 of them? 45?) Even with X2 in place, look how long this is taking us: this has been going on for almost a year, is taking up the time of a lot of editors and translators, and we all complain about having better things to do, and for what? A misconfig of some stupid tool by WMF? That's why the default is, "kill it, unless examined and struck" and not the other way round.

The other reason, is that if the default was "keep", then the last year of effort on the X2 review has been a colossal waste of time, yours, mine, and everybody else's. It's always possible to Prod or nominate any article for deletion, you don't need X2 for that. If you're "keeping it now, just to be on the safe side" because it "might be useful" then you're negating the point of X2 and relegating those articles to the more difficult Afd process. This is an opportunity to save your time and everybody else's by deleting them now--without any prejudice to recreating them, which is not the case for an article that has been Afd-deleted.

Strike to adopt: Having said all that, I see nothing wrong with going through the list and finding and marking badly translated articles that interest you personally, and "adopting" them by striking them to indicate a commitment to work on them later, even if they are in bad shape now and have translation inaccuracies. I've done this in a handful of cases, and E-R I know you have, too. (Probably the formally correct way of doing that, would be to move such articles as are interesting to you but not of sufficient quality yet, to one's User drafts, and I should really go back and do that, but I admit to not having done so.) But I think it's not okay to just strike an article which you haven't evaluated or are unable/unwilling to evaluate, unless you're personally committing to adopt it and take that article on yourself after this period is over. It seems contrary to the whole basis of this project to just strike possibly mistranslated articles with the hope that someone else, some day, might possibly fix it. Otherwise, what are we doing here? Just strike the whole list in that case, save us all time, and we can all go do something else. (Jk; please don't do that, as it would be contrary to consensus, but that's kind of the point. ;-) )

I get it that there are disagreements on how this was all set up, and I'm a relative late-comer to the project compared to most people, and I would have done some things differently in retrospect, knowing what I know now, and I'm sure we all would have.

Here's one example of poor set-up: one of my pet peeves is about the possibility of nuking good articles that never should have been on the list in the first place. I am currently working to prevent this from happening. Background: the list currently contains some good articles of long standing which were overwritten by the badly designed cxt tool during the misconfig period. The tool allowed a user to overwrite an existing article without checking whether an article was already present under that name, so that a ten-year old good article could be replaced without warning by a garbage MT stub, by an editor using the tool who had no idea that this was even happening. Such an overwrite is tantamount to vandalism—it would most certainly be considered vandalism if done on purpose by an editor. For the most part these overwrites by the tool were immediately reverted by other editors who had previously worked on the articles, so that the good article is now back again, at least in the case of articles that have watchlisters. There is, however, a risk that some good articles that are on the list and not being watched might be nuked, if nobody notices. If the list had been created properly in the first place, this risk would not exist. That's one of my pet peeves.
Another example has to do with redirects, and I'm we all have our examples, as well.

None of this should stop the progress we're achieving with the project, they're just things we've learned since it started that could have been done better with the 20-20 hindsight we have now. We're close to the end, let's just finish this, so we can get back to normal. I can feel that just about everybody is about ready to be done with this, and just wants to see this in the rear-view mirror, so we can get back to stuff we're interested in. Until then, happy editing! (And translating! ;-) ) Mathglot (talk) 22:29, 27 May 2017 (UTC) update by Mathglot (talk) 23:04, 27 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I will re-read this later but for now let me just mention that if you go read the actual policy, at least when I did, there was zero mention of limits on its scope. As I recall it simply says that machine-translated articles can be struck at the discretion of any administration. The hell if I will translate anything in those circumstances. Elinruby (talk) 17:48, 30 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Elinruby: Just a post-script about my 'pet peeve' above about overwrites: thanks to a db report by Cryptic, finding these articles has just been made much easier as of a few hours ago. The report nails the set of articles that are in that category (around 200 of them). The beauty of it is, that these can, and should, be struck without regard to their content, because they never should have been on the list of 3,602 articles in the first place. Complete details at WP:CXT/PTR/Clobbers if you are interested. My only problem now, is whether there's enough time to do it. How would you feel about a short postponement, to allow time to complete these? Mathglot (talk) 05:28, 1 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot: I am in favor of a postponement to get stuff done or any other solution that will allow us to get stuff done. I just had to disappear for a couple of days because my mother had a crisis and we had to get her from the hospital into hospice care. Which means she is definitely terminal, for those unfamiliar. This is an expected event that came about a year sooner than anticipated so naturally we are all a bit distracted. I am available right now for a session though, lemme see what I can do with language tags and at least getting a topic on the unstruck items; I believe @DGG: said that a village gets an article if it can be verified that it exists, so there are a lot of unstruck articles that need striking if that is the case. Elinruby (talk) 05:58, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I mentioned a postponement someplace, I'll get you the link, but it's not an "official" request like an Rfc or anything, just mentioned it somewhere where more people might see it than here. As for the "village" thing, yes DGG definitely mentioned it, because I just saw it yesterday or today, but I forget where. All of the Gujarati villages are struck, because *every* Gujarati article is now struck, having been manually translated by Gujarati speakers. (Their English is not perfect, leaving minor problems with grammar, articles, and subj/verb/obj accord, but the translations are accurate fact-wise, so these problems can be cleared up by monolingual copyeditors.) Couldn't find his comment, but in searching for it, I did come up with this: WikiProject Villages of Bangladesh. I'll look for where I mentioned about a postponement, and send you a link so you can comment if you want. Sorry about what's gong on in the personal sphere, and just hope it goes as well as one can expect. Mathglot (talk) 06:21, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Elinruby: Found it; here it is: WP:AN/CXT#The interim period ends today (ignore the section title, it's not true). Mathglot (talk) 06:45, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Please help recruit editors for Asian and other languages

@S Marshall, Elinruby, Cryptic, No such user, DGG, Acer, Graeme Bartlett, Mortee, Xaosflux, HyperGaruda, Ymblanter, BrightR, and Tazerdadog:

Hi, all: Time is short, but not gone. We need more help for certain languages, and I've had some success in inviting outside help, and I'd like to turbo-charge that by asking for your help in inviting more users to help us.

As Elinruby said above, we especially need editors in Asian languages, but also in others, like zh ja fa uk tr hu pl cs ar ru el he pt and others. If we could split up the work among us so that we all send out a few invitations to users who are listed as translators of these languages, we could get more of the items in the list taken care of.

So far, this has worked for me in a few languages, namely Gujarati (spectacularly, knocking off every Gujarati article on the list thanks to the help of two native speakers) and on a smaller scale for Hindi and Portuguese. But it was slow going, because I was writing invitations by hand one by one, for a total of four so far. Now I've automated this, with a new template.

My experience so far has been that if you invite a new user and can include a short list of 2-5 articles right in the invitation itself, this appears more manageable and is less overwhelming than sending them directly to the huge list of articles in every language, which can be off-putting.

To speed up the invitation process and keep it manageable and attractive to users, I've created an template {{X2 review help}} which can be used on User talk pages or on WikiProject talk pages. It's designed to be able to include up to five articles right in the invitation. This way, you can make a direct appeal for help for a task that is manageable in size. There's no need for your volunteer to even visit WP:CXT/PTR at all, unless they wish to; they can just ping you with results for their two or three articles, which you can then integrate into the master list when they're done.

This has worked well so far, admittedly on a small scale. Once someone looks at two or three articles, you can send them a list of a few more. Plus, there are many translators available for most languages, so you can invite more than one person per language. (The template doc itself has links to several places to find translators, to make this easier.)

So if you're willing to help out, can I enlist you to pick a language or two, and send out a few invitations to user/translators, along with a short selection of articles in that language? I've created a subpage at WP:CXT/PTR/By language to make that effort easier, and also as an alternative destination if you find a volunteer who wants a longer list of articles in their language. I literally only just started it, so it only has Russian and Chinese so far, but I plan to expand it to other languages as I can, and it would be great to have help with that.

Any suggestions on how to best divide up the work (by language? batch of articles? users? to avoid duplicate effort and be most efficient is welcome, but whatever it is would have to happen quickly.

I hope the documentation page for the Template is clear; if it isn't please feel free just to fix it, or leave me messages on the Template talk page at Template talk:X2 review help. It seems to be all tested and working; you can invite yourself with a message to your Talk page or sandbox, or feel free to invite me on my Talk page if you wish, as a test.

I'm going to start with Farsi and then Arabic, and I'll maybe add my invited user list here to avoid duplication, in case anyone else wants to jump in with those as well. We definitely need Chinese right away, some eastern European languages, and plenty of others. Here's a list of some useful links, also present in the Template doc itself:

{{X2 review help}} - the template
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory - Language Project talk pages are a possible location for an invite
Wikipedia:Translators available - list of translators by language
Category:Wikipedians by language
Category:Available translators in Wikipedia

Your help in inviting users to help would be much appreciated. If you want to invite yourself to see what it looks like, try pasting any of these examples onto your talk page (or onto mine):

{{subst:X2 review help|Arabic}} ~~~~ : language invite, without examples
{{subst:X2 review help|Russian|article1=Novy Mir|article2=Leo Tolstoy}} ~~~~ : typical example
{{subst:X2 review help |Hindi or Urdu |link=yes |article1=Amritsar |article2=Shah Rukh Khan |article3=Lucknow |article4=Kamlahgarh |article5=Lahore}} ~~~~ : max of five articles
{{subst:X2 review help}} ~~~~ : no args; not very interesting, but works

Thanks! Mathglot (talk) 05:44, 28 May 2017 (UTC) updated by Mathglot (talk) 07:03, 28 May 2017 (UTC) [reply]

This effort is actually starting to bear fruit, and appears to be accelerating. But there's so little time left. I think a little bit more time could be put to really good use in this area, and I was wondering if people would be upset if we extended the deadline by another month, in order to give a chance for the current editor recruitment effort for Asian and other languages to have time to return the results it's already starting to do? See WP:CXT/PTR/By language. Mathglot (talk) 07:09, 30 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Attribution required for keepers

This is getting ahead of ourselves because it's post-nuke activity (and not necessarily on us to accomplish), but just so I don't forget later: every item remaining after this is all over must have copy attribution; this is a Wikimedia requirement, not a guideline or policy. See e.g., {{translated page}}. Mathglot (talk) 21:50, 28 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Now that I'm thinking about this: the surviving articles that still have rough patches in them as far as the English is concerned may need tagging by one of the translation templates. But this is an optional thing, meant to improve the article; the attribution tag takes priority. Mathglot (talk) 21:57, 28 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

For the most part the translation tool should have placed an edit summary providing cross-wiki attribution to the original article; is this being missed anywhere? — xaosflux ^Talk 03:35, 31 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Xaosflux: this is being missed essentially everywhere. I believe that apart from my own translations on the list I have only seen one translated template. I can only guarantee French but I will start applying this to those articles that I look at. I have done some spanish and Portuguese work simply because there was a lot of it and we don't seem to have any native speakers in those language, although Mathglot also can read Spanish, I think, and a little better than me. But there are many many many translations from Spanish and a whole bunch more from Portuguese. I am thinking that I could use that "contains information frim" wording that some of the Bulgarian art articles have Elinruby (talk) 06:06, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Xaosflux said: "...is this being missed anywhere?"

Almost everywhere, AFAICT. Mathglot (talk) 06:25, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Elinruby, please don't feel like you have to place attribution templates; it's boring, it's rote, and it's a waste of your talents; a bot can do that. I'd rather have you doing all the other things you do well, rather than that kind of scut work. Plus, there's something I find distasteful about any of us placing attribution templates, for something somebody did in two seconds with machine translation. Or, if you're really dying to place them, then at least please wait until after the nuke, when we'll all have more time. There are *so* many more important things to do with our time now. Mathglot (talk) 06:29, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

OK I see your point. I actually kinda want to do something mindless right now but the language tags will do for that I suppose... Just starting a pass and will try to advance this and that as I go along. I havd been knocking out the simpler translations as I go but I guess I will stop that and focus on evaluation. Elinruby (talk) 06:33, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Elinruby: Yep; we're on the same page. When I need mindless, I lang-tag.

There's also another mindless activity you might like: generating two- or three-word capsule descriptions for the big list, like, "French javelin thrower" or "Italian philosopher". It's very mindless, and if you do it right, very fast. For the fast method, you might have to turn on something in your settings, if you don't already have it, so that when you hover over a wikilink, you see a sentence or two from the beginning of the linked article in a small pop-up box. Once you've got that set up, then open two windows: one with CXT/PTR in read mode, the other, with CXT/PTR in edit mode, both at the same section: let's saythe 2100s. Hover your cursor over the read-mode window, let's say, over #2156, and you should see a small pop-up window come up, saying, "María José García Jiménez is a Valencian politician, deputy at the Corts Valencianes for the IXth legislature." You can even put your cursor in there, and select/copy text, like I just did, to paste that sentence here. The two key words, obviously, are "Valencian politician." Copy those with Ctrl+C, then move over to the Edit window at #2156, and paste, and voila! Now, you can move down to #2158 in the Read window (#2157 is boring), and select/copy: "Sylvie Levecq is a former French athlete..." and copy "French athlete" over to the edit window. Very fast, and very easy. Actually, lang-tagging is probably more important than this. But I thought I'd mention the speedy mini-bio method, because it's really mindless, accomplishes a lot fast, and I thought you might enjoy it. Mathglot (talk) 06:58, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Trying to do that as I go but yes I have noticed your two-window method and consider it superior to mine, which generates a lot of clutter. May switch to that once I warm up. Have invited a few editors as well and may do more of that. And yes, I do have the extension that gives the mouse over. Elinruby (talk) 07:45, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Good job! I'm excited that you're using the new template to invite more users, because I think this can really leverage our ability to deal with these other languages. I saw your Spanish invite to Jmabel, but not any of the others. Btw, don't forget to add WP:FOURTILDES to the end of your invite, or they won't know who to get back to! In the case of Jmabel, don't worry, I added your sig there, but I didn't see the others, so if you forgot to sign your other invites, you should go back and add your four tildes. Also, when inviting users, I've been trying to record that on the WP:CXT/PTR/BL page; I'll add a section for Spanish if it isn't already there, so you can record who you've invited. Otherwise, things get out of hand, and you forget who you imvited, and when. Mathglot (talk) 09:50, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, I see you invited a whole bunch for Spanish, and also Norwegian. You forgot the tilde-sig on all of them, though, so you should go back and add that, so they can reply to you with their results. Here's the list:

And good job with those invites! Now you need to keep organized, as the responses start to come in. You can use the "xx LanguageName results" sections at WP:CXT/PTR/BL to manage that, otherwise you'll drown in what's been updated, and what hasn't. It's all self-management, at this point. Mathglot (talk) 10:50, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Elinruby: I added sigs for the folks you invited for Spanish and Norwegian, so they'll know who to get back to. (I also changed the two articles passed to them, so they don't all try to evaluate or update the same two articles.) As I mentioned elsewhere, language identification is now completely finished for the whole list, thanks to Cryptic's query 19423, so don't waste time on lang-tagging anymore. The tags aren't posted to CXT/PTR, rather, they are at WP:CXT/PTR/By language in the "xx articles" sections (where "xx" is es, fr, zh, etc.) These tags come from the database and not from a regex scrape, so they are reliable, and they are complete. Mathglot (talk) 02:52, 4 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Pages translated from English to English

Here's the list of articles subject to X2 in English Wikipedia that were created by the CXT tool and translated from English. You read that right. The ones I've spot-checked are clobbers. One, (Sensuous_Chill) has a self-revert in the rev history with ES: "This was supposed to be published at the PT Wikipedia. Don't know what happened. " Not sure if the tool has a bug, or makes it easy for users to make mistakes, or what. Anyway, here are the translations from en-wiki to en-wiki:

Alliance_for_Open_Media (8984)
Chigozie_Agbim (4539)
Cramond (16182)
Duncan_Passage (963)
Hamza_Hakimzade_Niyazi (17642)
Hannah_Arendt (51148)
Jacob_Lurie (6614)
Park_Bo-gum (39038)
Philippe_C._Schmitter (2778)
Saudades_do_Brasil (2393)
Sensuous_Chill (8653)
Sunni_Cultural_Center,_Karanthur (10578)
User:Victor_Lopes/sandbox (46)
Yuanyang_County,_Henan (2018)
甲基异丙基酮 (37) (redir)

And the following are "translated" from Simple English wikipedia:

I'm too busy to look into this in detail right now, but if anybody wants to file a bug, be my guest. Mathglot (talk) 23:02, 3 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

All the enwiki-enwiki articles are reverted clobbers except User:Victor_Lopes/sandbox (which we need not worry about) and 甲基异丙基酮 (which I'm taking to RFD). —Cryptic 23:13, 3 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The first two from simple are essentially cut-and-pastes, and no worse than any other new article; M. K. A. D. S. Gunawardana and Rudolf Haag are reverted clobbers; and Tracey Packham was redirected without merger. —Cryptic 23:48, 3 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

stadiums

I have been ignoring someone's translations about stadiums because I have had too many articles about sports (that I didn't care about anyway) deleted and it seems pointless. BUT. If someone cares about these articles, they are going begging. I believe they are mostly in France. And I have too much else to do. Elinruby (talk) 08:14, 5 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

so this is why we have a lot of tiny art stubs

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Europeana_Art_History_Challenge

some articles are beautiful but can we talk to them about whether they plan to expand these? Elinruby (talk) 18:20, 5 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

There's already a discussion started at the talk page and I encourage more participation there. Everyone thinks making new articles is a good thing but I have yet to see any evidence that's true. (See WP:REALPROBLEM.) Chris Troutman (talk) 18:30, 5 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Article translated with CXT – but older article was about a different subject

Hi there,

Not sure if this is the right place to report this... the article Gran Teatro Nacional was translated with the Content Translation tool and has been improved since. The thing is, the old version prior to the translation [1] was about a theater in Peru, while the translated version [2] is about a theater in Mexico. What would be the best way to sort this and rescue the old information about the theater in Peru?

Also, is there something I can do to help with this project? Native Spanish speaker here. :) –FlyingAce^✈talk 15:15, 7 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@FlyingAce: There's some information about the problem at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/CXT/Pages to review/Clobbers, and this is on my list of articles that need further review at User:Cryptic/query/19060. Those both mostly assume that there were two different articles written about the same subject, though. What this specific situation calls for is a history split; if you give me a title to move either the old or new article to, I can do that.

How to help: we're still at the point where we're assessing individual articles at the master list for correctness. The easiest way to find articles translated from Spanish is at WP:CXT/PTR/BL (where there are also some instructions), but WP:CXT/PTR is the canonical listing if you're going to strike out or comment on entries. —Cryptic 20:21, 7 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Cryptic: Sounds good! I googled "Gran Teatro Nacional" and am seeing more hits for the theater in Peru, since it is open (the one in Mexico was demolished). Perhaps leave the old article at this title and move the new article to "Gran Teatro Nacional (Mexico)"?

I will take a look at the two lists you linked and see what I can do. Thanks! –FlyingAce^✈talk 22:22, 7 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@FlyingAce: I would create a disambig page, and two articles with parenthetical disambiguation. An important place to start, imho, is to come up with the correct article title for each article. Also, determine if one of those theaters is clearly the primary of the two, or if they are both more or less equal. This will drive whether the disambiguation page should be called (that is, take over the name) 'Gran Teatro Nacional', or whether it should be called 'Gran Teatro Nacional (disambiguation)'. Once that is decided, you can split up the material, even if it has to come out of old versions, into the two articles. Or, create a stub for one of them. So, you might end up with: 1. Gran Teatro Nacional (a disambig page), 2. Gran Teatro Nacional (Peru), and 3. Gran Teatro Nacional (Mexico).

History-splitting is a complex topic, and I yield to Cryptic and others with experience in this topic. Mathglot (talk) 06:18, 8 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I've done the history split, leaving the Lima theater at Gran Teatro Nacional for now. The guideline for whether that should be disambiguated too is at WP:2DABS; I'll leave it to folks who can read Spanish to decide whether either of the theaters is a primary topic. Neither article should need admin powers to move them around anymore, and - though I'd expect they both still do need to be moved, per WP:EN - that can be worked out on their talk pages. —Cryptic 07:07, 8 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you Cryptic and Mathglot for all your help :) I will get consensus for the renaming at the talk pages.

As for the work here, I understand that what is currently needed is to compare the translated article to the original to see if the translation here is accurate, correct? –FlyingAce^✈hello 23:09, 8 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that's correct. —Cryptic 20:25, 9 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@FlyingAce: Yes. And don't be shy about reviewing es items I have struck as well if you like. I have done a copy-edit on quite a few because there were so many and they weren't getting looked at; I read Spanish moderately well but I have never studied the grammar, just been around it a lot. Some I felt we important enough to justify the necessary work. The basic criterion is whether it would be easier to re-create the article than to fix the translation listed here. This answer is a little different for each of us, but as far as I know you are the only *native* Spanish speaker at the moment so if there is an egregious translation error from Spanish you are more likely to catch it than me. Thank you for any brainpower you apply to these articles. Elinruby (talk) 01:42, 11 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]