The publishing of newly translated articles is an important juncture for anyone supporting Translation workshops/assignments.

Although, the Content Translation tool is very good and helps with removing a lot of the headaches of formatting a new Wikipedia page, there are elements that may need checked over.

In particular:

• Does the article contain too much machine translation?
• Does it read naturally?
• Is it well-structured and coherent?
• Is it well-referenced? (aiming for a citations peppered throughout the article).
• Has the tool misaligned paragraphs?
• Has the tool struggled with copying across citations or boxes of any kind? (tables, quotes, infoboxes)
• Have images not copied across?
• Are there any typos, grammatical errors or empty headings?

If the answer to any of these issues is Yes then the article should definitely not be published into the target Wikipedia until these are corrected… either correcting in the Content Translation tool window itself OR through publishing into a draft space on the target Wikipedia, where the article can be tidied up using the extra functionality of the Visual Editor’s drop-down menus and only then published to the live space from there.

While the Content Translation tool warns against publishing articles containing too high a percentage of machine translation, it is still possible to do so. At this point, a reviewing editor on the target Wikipedia may nominate the article for deletion if due diligence has not been applied to ensuring the article is as good as humanly possible before publishing to the livespace.

Once it is published to the livespace, templates are your friends.

Add newly published articles to your Watchlist.

This means you will be notified of any changes to the articles and can monitor them during the important first few days of their infancy on the target Wikipedia. It is good practice that anyone supporting the assignment should do this in order to safeguard any new article from undue scrutiny or nominations for deletion.

Adding templates is another good step to flag up that:

• the editor is a new user – {{this is a new user}}
• the article is still being worked on – {{in use}}
• the article is still being worked on but you are welcome to help – {{under construction}}
• the article is a translated page – {{translated page}}
• the article is part of an education assignment – {{education assignment}}
• the article is by a new user – {{new user article}}

The In Use and Under Construction templates are placed on the article itself by clicking Edit Source and adding the markup code for either {{in use}} or {{under construction}} then clicking Publish Changes to save the edit. These templates are supposed to be added on temporary basis and should be removed when the article is no longer requiring of major work.

Translated page, education assignment and new user article templates should be added to the Talk page of a new article. Again by clicking Edit Source to enter the markup editor on the Talk page and pasting in the markup code for these templates.

The Sami Assembly of 1917 article on English Wikipedia shows these three templates on its Talk page below.

Templates are different in other language Wikipedias so the markup code may be slightly different

e.g. it is {{educational assignment}} on Chinese Wikipedia.

e.g. Not all the templates are on Spanish Wikipedia, only:

1. Proyecto educativo{{proyecto educativo}}
2. Traducido de {{Traducido de|1|2|3|4|5}}
3. En uso{{en uso|nombre de usuario editor|t={{subst:CURRENTTIMESTAMP}}}}

So you may need to request that these templates are created in the target Wikipedia.

This is an ongoing effort to make all the language Wikipedias have some consistency in the helpful templates available for use. Especially when we are supporting translation work between Wikipedias.

Further reading

1. Example of a Japanese Wikipedia talk page template
2. Example of a French Wikipedia talk page template.
3. Example of a Chinese Wikipedia talk page template. and another here.
4. Example of an English Wikipedia talk page template.
5. Example of a Spanish Wikipedia talk page template.
6. Further guidance on providing aftercare at the end of a workshop/assignment.
7. Example Wikipedia project page for managing the assignment – with completed table of published articles.
8. Example project page for creating your own Wikipedia translation assignment.
9. Moving an article into Wikipedia’s live space from your sandbox/draft space (video).
10. Moving out of your sandbox (pdf handout).