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

View page Show All Versions

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?

History

Enable pagination rows per page

Information	Version
Tue 19 of Feb, 2008 21:52 GMT alain_desilets	30	Actions View Source
Tue 19 of Feb, 2008 20:39 GMT alain_desilets	25 - 28	Actions View Source
Tue 12 of Feb, 2008 21:18 GMT alain_desilets	24	Actions View Source
Tue 12 of Feb, 2008 21:13 GMT anonymous	23	Actions View Source
Tue 12 of Feb, 2008 20:45 GMT alain_desilets	22	Actions View Source
Tue 12 of Feb, 2008 15:12 GMT anonymous	21	Actions View Source
Tue 12 of Feb, 2008 15:06 GMT lphuberdeau	20	Actions View Source
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 21:33 GMT alain_desilets	18 - 19	Actions View Source
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 20:58 GMT alain_desilets	8 - 17	Actions View Source
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 18:29 GMT anonymous	7	Actions View Source
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 17:33 GMT alain_desilets	6	Actions View Source
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 17:00 GMT alain_desilets	4 - 5	Actions View Source
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 16:44 GMT anonymous	3	Actions View Source
Tue 05 of Feb, 2008 15:55 GMT alain_desilets	1 - 2	Actions View Source