History: Alain's test and feedback, 2008-02-05

Source of version: 7

I tried to eat our own dogfood this AM. Below is an account of what I found.

But before I go, let me congratulate L-P on an excellent job. Although it may look below like I'm bitching and complaining, I'm not. I am astounded by the amount of work that L-P has done in such a short time. 

But there are many things that could be improved and I talk about them below.

What I tried to do was to create a translation of my page ((Alain Désilets)) on the site, into French and Spanish

!Issue #1

The page ((Alain Désilets)) did not have a language assigned to it at the start.

I clicked on Translate button, and saw a pick list of languages. I selected French, thinking that this would specify the language of the translation.

Unfortunately, this was a case where the source page did not have a language associated with it, and this picklist was for specifying the language of the source page. So I ended up with a source page in French.

Now, as it turns out, there was a message above the language picklist that said:

   "No language is assigned to this page. Please select a language before performing translation."

But it was in a microscopic font. And since I was in a translation mode, as soon as I saw the language picklist, I assumed it was for specifying the target language. In order to counter that assumption (which I think many users will have), we need to display a __much more prominent WARNING: style___ message.

Another thing that could be done to minimize occurences of these kinds of cases, would be to do a better job at guessing the language of a newly created page.

For example, if I just created the present page using a dangling link on page ((Cross Lingual Wiki Engine Project)), which is in English. In a case like that, I think it's safe to assume that the page is in English.

!Issue #2

OK, so I changed the language of the original page to English, then proceeded to translate it to French and Spanish.

Then I changed the French page and added original content to it.

Then I went back to the English page, and expected to see some sort of warning that the French page was more up to date.

At first, I didn't see anything related to translations.

Then L-P pointed out to me that there should be a Translation module in the upper left corner.

__This tells me that maybe the information about translations and out of dateness should be somehow more prominent, or maybe closer to the language picklist at the top right.__ But maybe this would be crowding the UI too much.

!Issue #3

Looking at the Page translation box, I noticed that it said that there was no page with more up to date content.

I asked L-P why, and he said it's because I didn't tell Mozilla nor Tiki site that I can read other languages.

So I went to my User Preferences page, in the Languages section.

I picked French as a language I can read. This added 'fr' to the list of languages. Then I clicked on Change Preferences button, and the picklist of languages turned blank. 

This was confusing to me. I thought there was a bug and it failed to register my prefernece. Eventually, I understood that the text field on the left is where the preferences are stored, and the picklist on the right is just a way to choose a language to add.

__Need to make that clearer.__ For example, the first item of the picklist, instead of being blank, should say something like "Pick a language to add". The text box should have a caption that says "Languages you can read". There should be a button that say "Add" beside the picklist.

!Issue #4

Once I changed my user preference to 



!Issue #???

What about starting to translate, and then finding you need to do an original contribution while translating? I.e. mixing translation and original authoring at the same time?

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Tue 19 of Feb, 2008 21:52 GMT alain_desilets	30
Tue 19 of Feb, 2008 20:39 GMT alain_desilets	28
Tue 19 of Feb, 2008 20:29 GMT alain_desilets	27
Tue 19 of Feb, 2008 20:25 GMT alain_desilets	26
Tue 19 of Feb, 2008 20:16 GMT alain_desilets	25
Tue 12 of Feb, 2008 21:18 GMT alain_desilets	24
Tue 12 of Feb, 2008 21:13 GMT anonymous	23
Tue 12 of Feb, 2008 20:45 GMT alain_desilets	22
Tue 12 of Feb, 2008 15:12 GMT anonymous	21
Tue 12 of Feb, 2008 15:06 GMT lphuberdeau	20
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 21:33 GMT alain_desilets	19
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 21:31 GMT alain_desilets	18
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 20:58 GMT alain_desilets	17
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 20:42 GMT alain_desilets	16
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 20:41 GMT alain_desilets	15
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 20:19 GMT alain_desilets	14
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 20:05 GMT alain_desilets	13
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 19:45 GMT alain_desilets	12
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 19:15 GMT alain_desilets	11
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 18:51 GMT alain_desilets	10
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 18:41 GMT alain_desilets	9
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 18:41 GMT alain_desilets	8
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 18:29 GMT anonymous	7
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 17:33 GMT alain_desilets	6
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 17:00 GMT alain_desilets	5
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 16:58 GMT alain_desilets	4
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 16:44 GMT anonymous	3
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 15:55 GMT alain_desilets	2
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 15:51 GMT alain_desilets	1