Grants talk:PEG/Kruusamägi/Minority Translate, phase II

A decision has been made on this grant. Comments are still welcome on this page.

GAC members who support this request

1. small and clear project that I would definitely support. I would start using this app even now as it is useful and easy to work with. The budget breakdown is simple and development costs seem justified based on the amount of time that developers are going to invest into it. Though it's not clear how 1 ths EUR of promotion were calculated, I would still support the grant as we already saw a good report for expenses in phase I and the proportion between development and promotion seems reasonable for me rubin16 (talk) 19:55, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

GAC comments

budget

Hi, great app! I've already started its promotion a little bit :) Could you, please, provide us with some more detailed information about budget lines? How many hours of developers work are expected? Would you hire someone new or will it be the same developer? What channels of promotion are you budgeting? Best regards, rubin16 (talk) 20:20, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Greetings and thanks for spreading the word! While I cannot comment on promotion side, I can anwser development related questions. The developer will be the same as last time (me). It's really hard to accurately estimate work hours. I would say about 300 hours, but I have a tendency of underestimating. There is also the time spent on adressing user feedback and maintenance. Usinväikebotikene (talk) 16:09, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

I have the same question: What the promotion costs are for? Regards, Violetova (talk) 14:47, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Promotional part involves spreading the word, collecting user feedback, creating icons, putting together manuals, developing this tool's wiki, setting up more translation recommendations, carrying out some workshops on editing Wikipedia and cooperation with universities. Promotional costs are meant mainly for compensating the time spent related to thous activities.

So far things like "spreading the word" have gotten a lot less attention than stuff like "collecting user feedback" in understandable reasons. Current public version (1.3 beta) works and indeed does what promised -- speeds up the article creation -- but it's still lacking most of the cool features. Next version has been promised to be made public in less than two weeks and it should include major fixes in functionality and usability.

Kruusamägi (talk) 17:54, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

First phase development didn't included any costs for promotional part even thou a lot of time was spent on this.

This time the changes to the program will be even bigger and there is also growing need to put more effort on promotional and supportive activities. My estimate is that ca 200 h will be spent on it, that would mean ca 50% growth compared to I phase (i. e. the same growth rate as in software development; 200h → 300h). Kruusamägi (talk) 22:19, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

WMF comments

Hi Kruusamägi. Thanks for your continued work on this project. We have some questions regarding how this tool will be promoted and would like more details regarding how it will fill a gap that the current translation tool does not address.

1. You mentioned that in the development of Minority Translate, you have taken the approach to make it as different as possible from Content Translation. Can you explain in more detail why this is?
2. You had also said that what Content Translation is offering doesn't necessarily meet the needs of small wikis. What are the main gaps you're trying to fill?
3. A large focus of this grant is on promotion for the adoption of the tool by other small language communities. Have you already identified communities you'd like to work with in the beta phase and received confirmation that this is something they would be interested in testing? If not, it would be good to do this initial outreach so we have a better understanding of the potential impact of the grant. Do you already know which universities you will target for promotion and will the editing Wikipedia workshops be held in coordination with those universities?

Looking forward to your responses. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 19:12, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

Initial idea dates back to spring 2013 and it was somewhat similar to CT. Then we came to know that something like this was being developed and we just waited as it doesn't make sense to duplicate efforts. Then it came out that CT wouldn't be present soon and it wasn't even clear if it will be able to solve the problem we wanted to target. That's how we started. And as it's impractical to just compete with CT (even thou we might be able to win), then it seems more useful to search for unused niches so that MT would stand next to CT and not against it. It would also help to test out more ideas.

Start-up approach would be to have something that is useful first and usable later, to use iterative design and constantly collect user feedback, etc. With MT I have tried to solve real problems that users have today and tried to do it on a most time/money efficient way possible. It seems to me that CT wants to be like a full end-product that you just offer to people and then hope it will enjoy widespread use. But are you sure that people actually need it? Lot of resources have been put to this, but are you even sure that focus is set on right place? Making a new thing based on user surveys is a rather bad idea.

Small wikis need a very rapid way to build the basic structure of the wiki. MT focuses on that speed.

I don't agree that 35% is "a large focus". I have previously pointed out that this "promotion" actually compromises pretty much everything, that isn't exactly writing code. That's a lot of work. Before, that wasn't even counted in, even thou it had an important role on getting the tool where it is now.

About 300 articles have been started with this tool. That seems like an interest. It has been tested in different small wikis (mainly Finno-Ugric) and in Incubator (Livonian). Users have stated that they like the tool.

Main partner will be the University of Tartu, that I already have an extensive cooperation. Hopefully I can get some help in software development (hey, this is Estonia), language processing (this uni. is one of most important centers of Finno-Ugric language studies) and in testing (they also teach translators here and after some upgrades it could be fairly usable to them inside the education project).

Kruusamägi (talk) 02:08, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

Hi Kruusamägi. Thank you for the responses. The current measure of success only relates to updating the functionality of the tool. We would like to see better metrics about the number of people who tried the tool and published articles. Please see Content Translation analytics for reference. As discussed, the outreach campaign is a critical part of this second phase and we look forward to learning more about the outreach activities and their impact. Otherwise, we are ready to fund this request. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 19:45, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

I added some metrics about that.

Among the things to be done is a statistic module for server, so it would be possible to get constant up to date information about the use of program. This is also meant for better classroom support: next version should include tag-system, that helps to link together edits made by different users under some event or classroom activity. For that the server needs edit filtering capability to be able to take out the tagged articles by request.

I'm aiming for classroom use of the program, but it is difficult to achieve it already in spring semester. There is also a lot of testing required and that should be done in smaller groups. Therefore the user numbers wouldn't be that high. Not to mention the difficulty of getting people to use new things. Kruusamägi (talk) 01:52, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for providing additional metrics. I think it will be useful to check back in on usage not only at the time of the grant report (September 29, 2015), but also 6 months after the completion of the updated tool. That will give us a better sense of the impact of the outreach work and more time for testing in the classroom. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 18:41, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

End date

As everyone was away during July, no progress was made then and we are now one month behind the schedule. Therefor I'd like to propose a new end date for the project: September 1.

July version should come out in this Sunday and final version by the end of current month. Kruusamägi (talk) 18:24, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

Hi Kruusamägi. This is approved. The new end date is September 1, 2015 and the final report will be due October 31, 2015. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 18:39, 6 August 2015 (UTC)