Template talk:trreq

Why this template?
Why would one add this template for a particular language? After all, I'd think that people can contribute translations in any language, and it would be arbitrary to single out one or two languages as those for which a translation is wanted. Or is the idea that an individual may add this template to an entry to express a personal desire to know what the word/phrase becomes in that language? -- Smjg 17:26, 12 September 2010 (UTC)


 * We would like translations of all words in all languages, but we are very far from that target. In the meantime, if someone has a particular desire for a translation of some word into a particular language, he can add this, which drops a link into a request page for that language. Editors who watch the request pages can then add that word if they know it. —Stephen (Talk) 18:22, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Allow language codes as well as names
I was hoping nobody would object to allow language codes, using. It would work just about the same as. In the same way, would convert them all from language names to language codes. Comments? Mglovesfun (talk) 22:15, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
 * do it --Downunder 22:57, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Done, this test edit says it works. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:39, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Colon after template
The documentation says that the standard use is to have a colon after the template ( * : ). Is this correct? --Yair rand (talk) 21:28, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't think so, no. Perhaps it was standard at one point and has become obsolete. I dunno if WT:EDIT can replace it properly when there's a colon. The colon probably just stays put. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:28, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Template:trreq
Nomination: This template does more harm than good, IMHO. People should be taught to extract lists of translation tables that lack a translation for a particular language from the dump. For those who cannot or will not, there should be a wiki page filled from the dump once in a while. See also BP, October 2012. --Dan Polansky (talk) 22:03, 29 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Delete. --Dan Polansky (talk) 22:03, 29 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Unless someone can convince me that this is useful (and you need some really good arguments for that), I say delete. -- Liliana • 22:10, 29 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Keep. I fail to see how it does harm:


 * Saltmarsh said “actual translations are difficult to find”. I just disagree, I didn’t find translations harder to find. It just requires a little more scrolling, which is also necessary when there are many translations. Furthermore, targeted translations solve the problem.
 * Dan Polansky said “Such a list can be automatically extracted from a dump”. But a list of all terms without translations in a language would be way too big to be workable. It also defeats the point of allowing users to request that a translation be added to an entry.
 * Dan Polansky also said “we have almost no contributors in most of the languages tagged”. That’s true, but if someone who speaks a certain contributor-less language joins, he will have a nice, concise list of requested translations to start with, instead of behemoth list with every translation-less entry.
 * Liliana-60 said “I have not seen make a translation appear somehow faster.” Lo Ximiendo’s addition of Mirandese translation requests caused me to add a bunch of them. I plan on going through her more recent Mirandese translation requests and also all the Asturian and Extremaduran requests when I have time. So, thanks to her and to, we have some Mirandese translations we would otherwise not have.
 * — Ungoliant (Falai) 23:08, 29 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Keep per Ungoliant. Err on the side of using it sparingly rather than overusing it, but keep it. It separates "entries for which someone specifically wants a translation" from "entries which simply lack a translation". Like Ungoliant, I've been inspired to add translations to entries which have this... whereas a list of all entries which lacked German translations would be unmanageably huge; I expect it would include &gt;50% of our entries—and German is among the languages most often found in our trans tables! - -sche (discuss) 00:26, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Keep. Having the dump for each language doesn't necessary add a good translation for another direction. People working on foreign language entries may consider adding translation on English entries, so they avoid having on the English words, which already have English entries. I do pay attention to translation requests, so do a few others, e.g. Finnish, Georgian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Khmer, etc. requests are currently regularly filled. I don't see harm in having requests apart from the interference with other languages when they are added via the assisted method. I don't see much use for languages, which are very unlikely to be filled in the near future but I agree with Ungoliant. If we get some, they know what's more urgent.

As a side-note, I actually think this tool could be used to request translations for basic and very common English words (or even important words, which are translation targets only), so that a foreign language contributor knew to add basic words needed for daily communication. As an example, we have quite a lot of translations of nouns into Macedonian but lacking very common verbs and adjectives, it's similar to other languages. Wiktionary fails to provide basic words for a number of languages because input from random users is not organised in a meaningful way. So, if a native Lao speaker were willing to add translations, he/she wouldn't have a clue where to start. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 00:43, 30 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Why would we use this template for basic words? Why not make a list of basic words and point translators to them?--Prosfilaes (talk) 07:45, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Keep per Ungoliant. &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 01:22, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Keep as a very useful template that focuses my attention on commoner words that need a translation in a language I'm working in. @Dan/Liliana, you don't seem to realize that I can't and won't translate everything, but what has been requested by humans tends to correlate to what is actually most needed. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 05:03, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Keep. Anything can be used to excess- if someone decided to wikilink every single word in every entry, would that be justification for getting rid of wikilinking? If you look at the contributions of this user, you'll notice that at least 2/3 of them consist of adding 7 characters-. is that a reason to delete that template? Chuck Entz (talk) 07:39, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Keep. Matthias Buchmeier (talk) 10:06, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Keep. Is it a joke? It's one of the most needful and useful templates. Maro 18:33, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

As a response to all those keeps: What you are looking for is not the list of all English terms and translations glosses lacking a translation for a language but rather the list of most common English terms and translation glosses lacking a translation for a language. This list can be had automatically, by inspecting the dump in conjunction with one of the frequency lists from FREQ, Category:1000 English basic words, or a manually created list of most translation-worthy English terms. Haphazardly added ttreq template does not keep up with this systematic approach. Furthermore, the appearance of new translators for rare languages is very hypothetical; it is very likely that hosts of ttreqs are going to sit in translation tables for ages, unless someone kindly removes them. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:09, 31 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Your point about rare languages is correct but the templates is added by humans, not bots, so we can just ask them to slow down and not request translations, which are unlikely to be filled. What words to request is up to people who request, they can request words they urgently need for something, interesting words, or essential words they may need any time for any language to communicate in this language. Pointing new-starters to lists is a good thing, it will help direct their efforts adding the most common words first (even though words by frequency will differ largely from language to language) but I see no problem with duplication. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 04:00, 2 November 2012 (UTC)


 * Not at all. The template is added, like other request templates, when users want particular information. The words which users want translations of are not necessarily common: Fennicize, for example, is quite rare. But someone wanted to know the German and French words for the concept, so I found them. - -sche (discuss) 04:35, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

Kept. bd2412 T 03:11, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Can this be entered by way of Assisted?
Would save time not having to figure out where alphabetically it should go. Bots automatically rearrange the translations (I assume) but would be nicer to have it in the right place from the get-go. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 00:58, 10 April 2014 (UTC)
 * There are several changes that need to be made to the translation editor. But there's nobody around to make them. 02:03, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Template:trreq
Previous discussion: Grease pit/2014/July. I am too lazy to link to the rest of the discussion, but you can follow the links.

The replacements for these templates are, and. has been migrated already once, but I notice some people still using as before, which makes me reconsider with my idea of moving  back to  (with the new syntax).

I think there is a clear advantage to the replacements, and the proposal had quite wide support and no oppose. Can we get these formally deprecated, so to speak? — Keφr 17:32, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

was deleted, since it was already orphaned, and no erroneous usage arised. (Feel free to recreate as a redirect.) Orphaning will take longer; xte can help with it. — Keφr 17:45, 10 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Redirect: Pur ple back pack 89  18:18, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Redirecting is just going to cause more breaking. People will expect the old template to work as it always did, which it doesn't of course. 00:51, 29 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Case in point. (Though there have been surprisingly few such mistakes, it seems.) — Keφr 13:02, 5 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Changing my vote to keep, and restore Template:trreq Template trreq shouldn't have been deleted in the middle of the discussion. Pur ple back pack 89  14:55, 12 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep, and thereby make old revisions more legible. I don't object to deprecating the templates. --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:02, 10 January 2015 (UTC)
 * You could use that reason to keep anything that's ever had a link to it. I think it's a terrible idea. Renard Migrant (talk) 18:07, 10 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I could use that reason to keep any template that was ever very widely used. And that is a good reason. It helps keep old page revisions legible. Very widely used templates should be deprecated, not deleted. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:38, 11 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Just noting that Template:ttbc is still used by ~1450 pages. - -sche (discuss) 01:05, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Just noting that it is still used by 1292 pages. - -sche (discuss) 18:22, 24 January 2016 (UTC)
 * 1213 now. —Enosh (talk) 15:46, 5 October 2016 (UTC)


 * For the record: Template trreq was deleted by Kephir on 10 January 2015. Per above, the deletion seems to be supported by Kephir and less explicitly by -sche, CodeCat and Renard Migrant; it is opposed by Purplebackpack89 and Dan Polansky (me). --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:12, 3 April 2016 (UTC)