Once introduced to the Wikipedia essentials (how to format and the main policies & guidelines), the first 2 hour workshop concludes with a discussion of how to select an article to translate.
NB: This is a very important step in our experience and worth spending the extra time on.
We found it helped if students could choose an article they were interested in BUT it is worthwhile for their chosen article to be approved by both a course tutor and a Wikimedian (worth making sure you have access to a Wikimedian to support the assignment)
It is important to assess:
- the word count of the source article is sufficient for the assignment.
- the subject and level of challenge of the article is appropriate for the student.
- the article does not already exist in the target Wikipedia.
Choosing an article
- Before you begin, the article in question will need to be run past both your course tutor and a Wikimedian supporting the assignment to avoid issues such as the article not having enough citations or references. If the source article does not then consequently the target article will not either and you run the risk of having your published translation deleted through no fault of your own simply because it is not sufficiently referenced.
- Select a high quality article. 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 fewer 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).
- Pages needing translation into English and do category searches for articles in a subject you are interested in e.g. Category:Articles needing translation from foreign-language Wikipedias. You can also view the Portal directory to search portals in the same way.
- 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. Alternatively, there is a Word Count tool you can enable on English Wikipedia which will count only the words in the main body of the article.
It is acceptable to translate only a portion of an article but the published translation should be coherent and well structured so that it does not appear incomplete on the target Wikipedia.
Decided on an article?
Add the article title to the Etherpad here and we’ll add it to the workshop dashboard.
Once you’ve decided, that is the hard part and we’re now ready to begin!