Questions to the community for Open Badge project

CLOSED This issue is closed

Please everyone answer; Sara to determine how to proceed. Investigation looks closed as of 2016

Hi everyone! From earlier discussions, we (Wikimedia Sweden) are now looking into how Open Badges can recognise the contributions and skills of volunteers on translatewiki.net, and hopefully motivate new translators to join. To do this successfully, I have a set of questions and it would be great to hear your answers and feedback. Basically, I'm interested to learn which skills are valued on translatewiki.net and how we can see this in translators' contributions.

1. Is it important that a user translates accurately? How can we see user's accuracy skills?
2. Is it important that a user contributes on a regular basis over time? What statistics can show that?
3. Is it important to collaborate successfully on translatewiki.net? How is this represented in statistics or contributions?
4. Are mentors important for the community on translatewiki.net? Is there a shared understanding on what characterizes mentorship?
5. How about a translator who takes on the messages that all others have skipped? Is there a useful way of describing these messages statistically?
6. What would be the milestone contribution scores from a beginner to an experienced translator?

If you have any questions about this project, don't hesitate to contact me.

On 5., it's recorded internally in the mw:TUX interface, but not exposed or used anywhere.

Thanks! We'll look into that, perhaps it can be implemented into the badges.

Some quick thoughts.

1. Difficult to measure. Could be approximated with proofread/non-latest edit ratio.
2. Yes! GitHub has this activity chart with streaks for example.
3. Could be approximated with edits to non-translation namespaces.
4. I have seen very little mentoring for translation here.
5. We have some data on this but nobody has looked into whether it is usable
6. First translation, first deployed translation (make a difference), contributing to multiple projects, achieving X translations/reviews, being active and around for a while.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, they're very useful!

If you want a wider response you should probably write to the users directly, e.g. via Special:EmailUser; and for a quicker, more scientifical analysis of a bigger amount of responses you'd probably want to direct them to a LimeSurvey.