As of this writing, the Gramps Discourse forum has 9 inactive language subcategories in the International area of the forum. They have been created but are locked. Users cannot post topics there.
That’s because we haven’t had a native speaker translate the “About” pinned message that tells users why the section exists and how to use it.
The idea is to invite non-english speakers (and users with problems that difficult to translate to English) to post questions in their native tongue. But it is a bit silly to invite them using English when they don’t speak that language!
We hope to also have a moderator volunteer too. That person doesn’t need to be a Gramps expert. But they must to be willing to help when Google Translate cannot bridge the language gap.
Here are the locked subcategories (and the number of views as of Aug.2024):
1 Like
The titles of the “(About the _____ category)” topics have been translated and a translation of the following paragraph has been inserted at the top of each.
Please excuse any poorly written sentences in this Google Translation. This <language> section is not open yet. It needs a native speaker volunteer to create (or translate) this introduction. The section will be opened as soon as that is posted. Join us in the Feedback area to help open this part of the community.
The Danish volunteer (Sanne Jakobsen) observes that Google Translate made this into an unreadable paragraph.
Translating the translation from several languages back into English made some things clear… Google Translate doesn’t understand “volunteer” as person. It sees ‘volunteer’ as “to help” instead. Nor does it know how to say: a forum is locked because we cannot even make the “Welcome message” readable.
The first 200 characters of the pinned posting are shown (as a Summary) when browsing Categories in Discourse. This should guide users to solutions where English IS the problem.
The International subcategories are not intended to be translated duplications of the main forum. Instead, it is meant for discussions where English is not suitable or understandable for the user. And for issues directly related to adapting Gramps to a specific language and culture.
So the pinned topic should not be a straight translation of the standard Welcome to the Gramps Discourse forum.
Here’s a possible summary that could be translated.
Sometimes meaning is lost in translation. This forum discusses Gramps genealogy software in Danish when English causes confusion.
What are the other points that should be addressed?
@Nick-Hall or @gramps-project
Please promote Kaj @kmikkels (founder of the Facebook group “Dansk gramps brugergruppe” and Weblate translator) into a moderator for our Dansk section.
I tried to give Kaj moderator status, but we are limited to 5 staff members on our free hosting. Staff include both admins and moderators.
We have 5 staff already:
System - the default admin account
Nick Hall - Admin
Sam Manzi - Admin
Brian Matherly - Admin
Brian McCullough - Moderator
We may be able to free up one or two of these, but it will soon be a problem again when we need more moderators for the other languages.
Perhaps we should consider self-hosting our Discourse forum?
There would be benefits to that.
But before expanding our monthly overhead and the regular maintenance tasklist. (I see fairly frequent “Scheduled Maintenance Notification from Discourse” email messages. If we self-host, wouldn’t all those shrouded maintenance be our burden? Or could we upgrade within their servers and still have their experts do the maintenance?)
As to the expense, I strongly suggest that the project contract a MediaWiki specialist to suss out why our wiki fails to upgrade. And to enable the Lua scripting. (Since the lack is preventing the wiki from making certain progress. e.g. having the Icon templates have a complete iconset ; creating wikipedia style templates for the Addons.)
Having a contractor come up with a plan to clean our wiki’s multi-language clutter would be nice too.
Did not find a MantisBT request with a superficial search. Only found this in @gramps-project’s Discussion page on his wiki User account.
Mediawiki request:Lua Script
Hi Sam888, When you have a moment can you consider installing Lua script so we can use the current generation of templates from mediawiki/wikipedia some of the benefits are improved performance and simpler to program the templates. Daleathan (talk) 23:37, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
Ok I’d like this installed also please. Attempted to bring a template across from wikipedia and found out LUA was not installed here. –Gioto (talk) 22:45, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
Wouldn’t a full implementation of Lua script interpreter require a huge commitment to adding Security, monitoring for malware and server overloads? Since it is user programming, it would probably also need a testbed site to minimize the risk of crashing the public site. There DOES seem to be a safer intermediate option where Lua Script can be used like a compiler to generate debugged static templates.
It seems like a more widely leveraged investment would be to add a more modern WYSIWYG page content editor. (Since the javascript-based MediaWiki editor we’re currently using was deprecated in January!)
Bamaustin (talk) 23:46, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
I’ll investigate if this is possible on our current hosting plan and if Gramp-project really needs to use LUA. (We are currently using MediaWiki 1.31.3 and that editor was removed in MediaWiki 1.32.x ) Sam888 (talk) 00:35, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
Hi @Sam888 Thanks for the consideration to investigate. @Bamaustin I’ve no opinion about Lua and the commitment required security wise. Not sure how a replacement editor will help in my case as the template I was bringing over works outside of CSS code. Both your efforts are appreciated –Gioto (talk) 03:12, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
Hi Sam888, some the reasons why I want LUA are mentioned on my talk page, thanks anyway –Daleathan (talk) 09:29, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
An “Ability to add multiple groups as moderators for a category” just found in the What’s New option from the Admin sidebar. Perhaps it allows designating at the International level and will inherit to all those subcategories. That way, moderators for other languages can help each other. And will be easier to manage at a single place for all those subcategories.
Ability to add multiple groups as moderators for a category
3.4.0.beta2
We’ve added the ability to configure multiple groups as moderators for a given category.
Learn more…
Since August, 3 of the 9 closed International sections have had volunteers improve the “About” posting so Sam and Nick could open them. The Danish, Finnish and German section are now open.
Of the original 14 languages, only 6 more to go! (Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and Italian.
Here’s the January 2025 Gramps GUI translation status:
