Disabled languages
There are currently 58 languages here (50 without translators and 8 with) which have been disabled for one reason or another. However, the portals for these languages don't mention that the language has been disabled, so it's not obvious to the reader whether a language is enabled or not. Could we:
- set up a category for disabled languages or
- put a note on the portal explaining why the language has been disabled or
- do both!
If we set up a category for disabled languages, could someone write a script which will put a disabled language into this category automatically?
IMO there shouldn't be a portal if the language is not enabled.
The "Languages" category would certainly be less confusing if the disabled language portals didn't appear in it at all. Would it be of use to preserve the information on a disabled portal, perhaps by moving the portal to a different namespace and putting all disabled portals in a category of their own? Perhaps the reason for the disabling could be noted on the move summary?
There may be Babel box entries for disabled languages.
There should be a clear indication that a language is disabled, and of course a category of disabled ones. That is why I think, portal pages are hardly avoidable, I also think that general information, such as scripts, code, equivalences etc. should be available, at least generally. When codes were dropped from ISO 639, or ther are other external reasons for having them disabled, we should have links to, or notes, so as to inform newcomers why we disabled them.
When a language could be enabled but is not for some reason, it would also be nice to have that information available, so that potential supporters know what to do.
Are you volunteering to put notes on disabled portals onto the backlog of disabled portals, Purodha? That would a good start, whether or not the portals get shifted somewhere else.
Yes, and yes, why not. I may not allways know the reasons why, but a start is at least a start.
This should imho be integrated into the template, and I'd already thought about how to do that page-layout-wise the day before yesterday, postponing it having no clear solution.
- When there are variants, e.g. en, they have to be treated idividually. That could mean replacing the links "Translation tool, recent changes" by a sentence such as "You cannot translate to English, since English is the general source language in {{SITENAME}}."
- When there are no variants, the top links "Translation tool, recent changes" might be replaced in the same way.
- Should the "recent changes" link not better be kept? At least for English, there is data vailable in RC, and also maybe for languages that had been translated to before they were disabled.
- So as to achieve a leaner page layout, we also have the choice to only show "disabled" or something similar, having a mouseover or a footnote or both showing the reason.
Your suggestions seem fine to me, but I don't have a clue how much work is involved since I know very little about software so my comments on your suggestions are not of much use!
I don't remember, have we made any progress here? Just adding a parameter to the template, taking the list of disabled languages from the config files in git, shouldn't be too hard a step (if we've not done it yet).
I've added a disabled= parameter which almost blanks the portal page, basically deleting it as Siebrand suggested, and I've added the parameter to the portals you had listed on Category:Disabled languages without translators; more reasons can be added in the parameter itself or as notes=.
Please check that the list of disabled languages is correct and that everything is ok.
Thank you for adding the parameter. I will update the list of disabled languages without translators and add or subtract the disabled= parameter as needed. However, there are some portals which have translators but are disabled (I will need some time to identify and list these). Will adding the parameter disabled= to these work?
It seems a shame to get rid of the information on the language and links to Ethnologue, Wikipedia, etc. And what about Purodha's point about the Babel boxes?
The word disabled is confusing here, since the category Languages without translators includes languages which have never been enabled as well as those which have been enabled and subsequently disabled. Since some of these languages have had portals started with a view to eventually being enabled, it is useful to have the information on the language still appear, but confusing to have links to non-existant translation tools and statistics appear.
Yes, the parameter works even if there are translators; the list of them is kept so that one can ask them info (that's the idea). Babels don't seem very useful, the link to Wikipedia in the header is kept; I don't mind readding some stuff but I think the portal needs to look completely different or the note won't be noticed at all (nobody reads warnings).
I think "disabled" is not too confusing as a parameter, but the note can surely be improved, just edit it; I also had to edit Translatewiki.net languages because the process to enable/disable and export or not languages is unclear; and still is. If a language has never been enabled I doubt there's much useful info in a portal: it should be kept only if it has discussions, terminologies or something else, otherwise deleted as Siebrand suggested. IMHO.
I've edited the template note. Thank you for improving the Translatewiki.net languages page.
Are you going to keep a track of site changes to spot new portals when they are set up, with a view to deleting them as they are set up?