The top half of the information is helpful in general (what does the “Calendar” selection do; what is “dual-dated”) but the bottom part shows how to enter date variations in your language.
[Why would this more likely be in your language than the wiki page? It would be translated by Weblate. These texts are seen and translated by a large group of people]
Helpful hints like these have become more important with the introduction of new languages planned for inclusion in Gramps 6.2, including:
Japanese
Korean
Chinese
Vietnamese
But I know it is useful for me already.
Where else could Gramps use brief, specific help hints?
Honestly, I think that we need to have a bigger discussion about the wiki. If that is the official help and manual of Gramps, then it desperately needs a refresh. I agree that it is both over and underwhelming, but it seems like this would be duplicating work. If there was a way to make sure this matched the wiki, or was pulled from there, that might prevent another area of possible mis-matched information.
I 100% agree! I didn’t necessarily want the “info project” to be anti-wiki, but in my honest opinion, if users have to go to the wiki, then we’ve lost. It has a number of issues:
It looks like an interface from 1995. It is jarring at the most visual level
It doesn’t get updated nearly enough
It is a real burden for translators to work on. It has far fewer translations than the strings in Gramps (understandably)
Every page needs updating, causing all translations to be outdated
Maybe we move away from the wiki and focus on smaller, specific chunks of text that can be more easily discovered and translated by translators? We don’t have to answer that now; let’s see how this works for some smaller portions of Gramps. But I certainly have your question at the top of my mind.
Of course the criticisms of the wiki in no way diminish all of the work people have done to write and organize all of that! It is not a criticism of that work at all, but of the process. In fact, I used the wiki as a starting point in crafting the info message in the above Date entry page.
Thank you for pointing out these issues @csam! It suggests a slightly different architecture than exists in the above Date editor PR. It suggests these questions:
What if the info texts could be assembled into a translated doc?
What if they were searchable inside Gramps?
And on a related note suggested by @emyoulation : what if the text supported markdown? That would allow a richer presentation than just text.
I did some exploring in Gramps:
There are 29 editors
There are 28 other dialogs
If all of that text could be broken into short paragraphs translated by Weblate, and the dialog help text could be generated when needed, you could have a searchable, markdown-based set of “pages” that could also form the basis of a document—all in the locale language.
button in the upper-left hand corner of the Date entry window. Here is the window shown in two languages:
