Have you ever wondered why the information in Wikipedia is extensive for some topics and scarce for others? Particularly in different language Wikipedias? On Thursday 9 February 2017, the University's
Information Services team will run a Wikipedia translate-a-thon for the Edinburgh University Translation Society. Full Wikipedia editing training will be given in the firsts session on 9th February before students decide on the article they would like to translate. Thereafter the following week's session 5pm to 6.30pm on Thursday 16th February will focus purely on beginning to translate the chosen article(s) using Wikipedia's new Content Translation tool.
We will provide training on how to edit and participate in an open knowledge community. Participants will be supported to translate articles.
5:45pm – 6:30pm: How to edit Wikipedia using the new Visual Editor.
Thereafter, attendees will be invited to search for an article to translate from one language Wikipedia to another. Students should have their chosen article selected for Thursday 16th February 5pm.
Programme - Thursday 16th February 2017
5:00pm - 5:15pm: Housekeeping and Welcome
5:15pm – 5:45 pm: Introduction to Content Translation
5:45pm – 6:30pm: Getting started with the Translation (practical)
In the first session we will run through Wikipedia's main policies and guidelines and how to create a userpage using Wikipedia's new
Visual Editor interface.
Next the
Content Translation tool must be enabled. This can be done in the
Beta menu (top right corner of your screen). Once in the Beta menu, make sure the Content Translation option is ticked and then click Save (bottom left corner of your screen).
Now you need to select an article or articles to translate. The tools below (categories, portals, Gapfinder, Not in the other language) will help you decide. Importantly, it should be a high quality article (check the references being used) of suitable importance & subject matter.
Once you have decided on the article to translate (and it has been approved by your course tutor) add the article title to the table below along with the languages being translated from and to.
Input the languages you are translating from and to.
Input the source article title.
Click Start translation.
The article will then be translated by you paragraph by paragraph. Check and double-check the paragraphs being translated that they make sense in the target language and that the formatting copies across correctly. Important: Save your work as you go by copying completed paragraphs into a Word or Google document entitled: 'YOUR NAME - New translated article - New article title'.
Once you are satisfied with your translation then click Publish translation to complete your translation. Make sure the newly published article has enough categories and links to other pages (and that other pages link to it).
Congratulations you have created your first page(s) and the assignment.
One final step
Finally, Wikipedia articles each have a sidebar listing its counterparts in other languages, so the last thing you should do is to make sure this includes links to and from the new translated material. A guide on this can be found at
Help:Interlanguage links but the Content Translation should add this automatically.
Choosing an article
Please make sure the chosen article is sufficiently challenging. The article in question will need to be run past myself to avoid issues that arose last semester because some of the original source articles did not have enough citations or references so consequently the target article did not either.
Please aim to select an article from the
Featured Articles quality criteria (the highest quality standard on Wikipedia) or the
Good Article quality criteria (the 2nd highest). There is a wider pool to choose from on English Wikipedia because it is the largest Wikipedia but you’ll notice that if you click on the Featured article link, there are links on the left hand side of pages to the
‘Featured Articles’ page in each of the other language Wikipedias. You will find the same if you click on the
‘Good Article’ links. There will be a lot less featured and good articles in other language Wikipedias but as long as the article has achieved good article status or featured article status, regardless of the language then it should be of the required standard to translate for our purposes. Therefore please take extra time to choose your source article(s) so that they are the right length, right level of linguistic challenge and have enough citations so that they will have no such problems in the target Wikipedia.
Tool: Gapfinder - This tool has been developed to help editors find missing content in any language for which there is a Wikipedia edition. GapFinder helps you discover articles that exist in one language but are missing in another. Start by selecting a source language and a target language. GapFinder will find trending articles in the source that are missing in the target. If you are interested in a particular topic area, provide a seed article in the source language, and GapFinder will find related articles missing in the target. Click on a card to take a closer look at a missing article to see if you would like to create it from scratch or translate it.
Tool: "Not in the other language" - This tool looks for Wikidata items that have a page in one language but not in the other (using Wikipedia categories to filter the results).
Check the word count of the source article. You can use this tool
Search tool to look up the article & its word count but this includes references in its count so is not accurate enough for our purposes. Hence you should copy the article's main text (not including notes, references, bibliographies etc.) into a Word document so you can get a more accurate indication of the main body of the article's wordcount.
Assignment details
Articles to be settled on by Thursday 16th February 2017.
Class list
#
Wiki Username
Chosen article(s)
Language translating from
Language Translating to
Newly translated article (to be added after it has been published)
Once you've learned the basics of editing using Wikipedia’s Visual Editor, I hope that you'll stay logged in and edit or create more articles. I've added some booklets and some links below that you may find useful. As a first step you may like to check out what
What Wikipedia is not along with its 5 guiding principles:
The 5 pillars.
Please sign your messages on
talk pages with four
tildes (~~~~). This will automatically insert your "
signature" (your username and a date stamp). The or button, on the tool bar above Wikipedia's text editing window, also does this.
If you would like to play around with your new Wiki skills without changing the
mainspace, the Sandbox is for you.
Sources
Wikipedia is a tertiary resource, which relies upon secondary sources. Wikipedia is not a place for original research.
Sign up! Add your Wikipedia User Name to this section by clicking the blue button below (follow instructions). Your name will be added to the bottom of this page
Don't worry! If you haven't edited Wikipedia before and don't have a Wikipedia User Name yet, we will help you on the day of the event! And remember to have fun!