User talk:Eoinjones/sandbox

Hi, thanks very much for your offer to help and for your advice. I agree that keeping the English translation up to date will be challenging. I am Irish but I have been living in Switzerland for the past few years. I read a German newspaper every day but I think the story is covered in more depth in Germany. The Tagesanzeiger have a deal with the Süddeutsche Zeitung to use their foreign news (and I have read quite a lot about the story there) but they don't republish everything. I guess I will just put the German wikipedia page on my watchlist and try to keep abreast of changes that way. I will have some holidays starting next Wednesday and will be able to devote more time to completing the draft translation then.

My sandbox has a talk page but I haven't initialised it yet. I will do that today. Thanks again for your helpful response. getoffmycloud 09:24, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi, that's good to hear from you. - To make the collaboration swift and easy and avoid any obstacles I would suggest I should perhaps do some raw translation in your sandbox here. I think it would be a good idea to highlight these in some way, so that you can see them at first glance and do the proofreading and refurbishing (language-wise and stylistic, and then undo the highlighting). What's your idea about that? (I'm still quite a Newbie to WP.) - One thing more that might interest you: I did a lot of editing on the english version of the article and also added a lot of good sources in english. (You can find them very quickly, if you look for "Retrieved .. August 2012" in black in the reference section.) All that independently from the german version, just building up from what I found that was already there. - If you like to have a look at it and do some proofreading and refurbishing as for my language errors and glitches of style, I would very much appreciate that. (Please feel absolutely free to edit right away. Anything that hurts the eye of a native-speaker.) - As it is always the case, applies for me too: passive (i.e understanding) capabilities in the second language are far better than the active ones (i.e. scope of vocabulary at hand when wanting to say something). It's a constant feature of us Germans to end up making very long and complicated phrases. (See Mark Twain "The Awful German Language". Really enjoyed his poking fun at us. And he really has a point there.) Besides, Switzerland must be a hard place for foreigners learning german language skills (heavy accent and the rest). But they are kind and good natured people. (Well, most of them. Others calling us "Sauschwab" and very xenophobic.) I envy them in many ways: never had engaged in any war for almost two centuries. May sound somewhat cynical, but to my mind this whole pompuously celebrated "Liberation war" against France was useless. Our ancestors should have kicked out all these petty-monarchs first. That would have spared Europe and the world two worldwars and a lot of bloodshed. - Bit off-topic all that. But I'm just in the mood for a little chat. (You may delete it right away after you've read it.) Bye for now (and please tell me about your ideas to set the translation thing on a working footage.) Warm regards -- 46.115.22.208 (talk) 21:04, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi, that sounds good. To highlight text that has not yet been proofread you could use a different colour. You use the "font color" tag to do this. You can find more information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advanced_text_formatting#Changing_font_color_or_span_style.3Dcolor

I often proofread English written by non-native academics from all over the world and I can assure you, Germans are by no means the worst (they are actually among the best). The most common problems for Germans are actually quite nuanced.

I am also quite new to wikipedia. I sometimes edit politics-related articles and I wrote one article about a political theory called "curvilinear disparity".

With regard to Switzerland, sometimes I feel they get a bit too much credit for their history of peace and democracy. Firstly, they were quite lucky that their civil war only lasted a few days because there was such a mismatch in terms of military strength. Secondly, the current system of "consensus democracy" did not really fully begin until the Socialist Party were allowed to take up a seat in the Bundesrat in the 1950s. What we refer to nowadays as the "Swiss model" emerged over a few hundred years as a loose confederation of cantons compromised to allow the formation of federal institutions. They have ended up with a very good constitution, but it was not really a deliberate invention - it was the end result of many years of pragmatic compromise. getoffmycloud 09:44, 11 August 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eoinjones (talk • contribs)

Hi, just to keep you informed. I just added a new section on the talk page of the english version ("Work in progress, Invitation for comments"). Also to avoid any alarmistic bold reverts and edits. (Saw that there are quite some drive-by editors around who don't contribute much to any content and are mainly focused on purity of style, which in the end could lead to unpleasant misunderstandings...) - When I've time for it, I shall have another look at it and see what can be done with the translation. Maybe, I would leave out all the formatting and give it a try head-on here on my computer like this: strip the whole article down to one simple text file, same for the google translation, numbering all the paragraphs consecutively running through, so that the original and the translation can be easily juxtaposed and compared. Then enjoying all the funny results of the machine translation and editing them out. That should perhaps be less cumbersome and work a lot faster. - Don't know yet, if I can promise you any success. If, I mean if, that works and I've got some results worth mentioning, I will send them to you. Let's see. - Best regards. Andreas (real name) -- 46.115.2.46 (talk) 16:52, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi, seems this constant changing of my mobile IP was a bit stretching on everybody's nerves, and hindering any reactions and replies... To see the end of it - and at long last, I've created an account of my own. So - as an alternative - you can always contact me there too. (Please remember to sign your messages.) - Looking very much forward to hear from you soon. - Warm regards. Andreas -- CaffeineCyclist (talk) 13:09, 12 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi again Andreas. If you are planning to work on content offline, perhaps you could list the sections that you are planning to translate here so that we can coordinate our efforts. Thanks again for your help. getoffmycloud 09:24, 13 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi Eoinjones, got not much worth mentioning done yet. Was sifting through a lot of WP help pages these days. There must be some practical tips about co-operating on a translation somewhere. Or are we re-inventing the wheel? - I'd rather prefer pencil and paper as in the good old days. Not much chances for scribbling ideas and alternative wordings anywhere with these computers. - Pondered on it for a while and found something, that I pass right on to you.

Basically, editing WP seems to be kind of editing simplified web source code. There is a way to write notes, remarks or anything into web source code, that will remain hidden and completely ignored by the browser. Anything marked up like this:

<!-- [hidden text here] -->. You can write anything instead of "[hidden text here]", but no sharp angle brackets < >, these are reserved symbols!

This should provide a useful container where to stuff notes, alternatve translations etc. that come up first hand and may be reconsidered later on. Such a container can be placed anywhere in the normal text. (Have it handy in a text editor, copy and paste via clipboard.)

Web masters of course don't like features that cause unnecessary traffic load, and that should be purged later on. But I think in the sandbox and during the work process that should be OK. - Note: have not tried it yet, but I think that should work. (And, please forgive me, if I have explained here at length something you already knew.) - Warm regards. Andreas -- CaffeineCyclist (talk) 18:22, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi again, I think the same notation is used for comments in HTML, but it has been a long time since I have looked at that type of thing so it was worth repeating. The problem I have when I edit on Wikipedia is that the presence of all the markup language makes it quite hard to focus on the prose. How about if I export the text to a Google Document and we can collaboratively work on the translation there? That way we can just focus on the quality of the translation in the short-term and easily exchange comments. It would also mean that we do not need to merge or coordinate offline edits. Later on, when it is close to completion, we can bring the text back into Wikipedia and complete the references. If any other users wish to collaborate they could leave a comment here and I could send them the link via a private message. Would that be OK for you? getoffmycloud 14:27, 16 August 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eoinjones (talk • contribs)

Hi, found a work-around to force WP to leave you alone and stop that markup nuisance, instead display the same as you have in the editing pane if you want to work with unformatted plain text. (Documentation is here: Template:Pre2)

{{Pre2|[Write all your text here. It may be as long as you want.]}}

Just put "{{Pre2|" at the top and "}}" at the bottom end. (Best would be, to put both of them in an extra line to themselves respectively, as to avoid touching them by accident.) Everything between these two then will be good oldfashioned plain text and exactly the same as in the editing pane. (For illustrating put an example in my sandbox. Copy and paste of first paragraphs of your translation.)

What do you think of it? I hope this helps. - Warm regards. Andreas -- CaffeineCyclist (talk) 16:20, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for that. That looks like a good way to edit without any clutter. So shall we use your sandbox or mine for the translation? getoffmycloud 13:53, 17 August 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eoinjones (talk • contribs)

Hi, sorry, for keeping you waiting so long. - My friends came along and literally tore me away from my computer. Well, yes, they're friends and know what's best for me, and it was sun, fun and company.

Of course you may start editing in my sandbox right away. Please leave a short note in an extra line of the section where you're at, so that I'm aware of it and don't by any chances spoil your work. - I'm far behind on my time schedule now. I wanted to have the road all neatly paved for you. - If something needs further discussion or explanation you could write "see TP" and add a new section to the sandbox TP where we shall exchange our views and try to find a solution.

I transferred the text of the german version via copy and paste to a textfile (as mentioned before). Then added 4 extra lines at the top for the Version Info, numbered all the paragraphs (which in a text file actually always are one single line) continously starting from DE-005. These are the section titles in my sandbox. First is always the german version. Then follows EN-005 etc. for the machine translation. The clean version is/will be EJ-005 (for your initals) your version, since you will have the final say.

Once you think, the translated text in a paragraph EJ-005 is OK, then please change the section titel from "DE-005" to "DE-005 OK". (In the editing pane that's at the very top, from "===DE-005===" to "===DE-005 OK===".)

Thus by toggling the contents box we can always see what is already done. Please leave the german text untouched, because I shall need it for comparison, in case german WP changes. But of course the machine translation "EN-005", and the parts "OLDER VERSIONs" which I left for you for quick comparison may be discarded then as well.

This numeration layout is quite good for harvesting the final version. It will be then all the paragraphs starting with "EJ-" and can be done very quickly with regular expressions. (Note: There are some gaps between the numbers for what were empty paragraphs. I left it that way, because it simplifies the look up of changes in the german WP.)

Sorry, I have not yet transferred the whole of your translation. But I've checked, compared and annotated all I placed there, ending as of now at "EJ-071". (Trying my best with the translation of that "DE-071". Absolutely hard stuff! Legal talk...) Hope I can do the rest of the transfer real soon. - As a fail-safe option I will always have a back-up copy of the source code here on my local hard-drive.

Oh, almost forgot. I saw you left an invitation for the translation on the TP of the german article. Perhaps it would be a good idea to add a link to your user TP as an external link (as you did for your sandbox link) right at the end preceding the signature. You see, the first thing that catches the reader's attention is, that your signature is a "red link", since it directs to german WP (into the void). That gives the false impression that you can't be reached.

I have now opened the TP of my sandbox too and left there a short technical note about how other users could contribute. - Warm regards. Andreas -- CaffeineCyclist (talk) 16:57, 19 August 2012 (UTC)