One year project "What If?". About creating and working with a community of translators-enthusiasts



About a year ago, on June 26, Randall Monroe, the author of the comic xkcd launched the "What If?". The essence of the project is that Randall from the physical point of view, answering "stupid" questions that are often addressed with unexpected points of view. Of course, Randall never missed an opportunity to arrange a catastrophe on a planetary scale during the response.

But, the article is not about that. I would like to tell about "What if?" where we translate articles from "What If?". No wonder I published an article in a hub "project Management" (UPD: We moved to "I'm a PR", and what are we, and we — nothing), because the article is about how we manage it and what came out of it in less than a year (I started it to do at the beginning of September 2012).



the

historical introduction



By the time I started, I found a few sites with translations, but they were not very successful, mainly suffered from the quality of the translation, but most of all I didn't like the design.

So I took the job, and it went very briskly. I quickly turned a dozen texts, made a quick website, published, and collected the first feedback, a lot of things have altered in the process. In General, the project has earned.

At first I tried to translate articles a day, although not translated images do not bother on typography, but I tried to translate well. And then, as there are more people in the project, we gradually moved to a release on Thursday.

Success came when we didn't expect. In a post on habré about 13 gigapixel xkcd comic I advertised your site and went home. When I came, I saw sharply skaknuvshem attendance and a very high load on the server. I was on edge and quite vividly has fixed all found bugs and improve the website. At that time the site consisted of markdown files on github, which I then manually uploaded to the site.



There I met with in absentia bobermaniac. At first I was kind of too shy to contact him, painfully well he translated. But I was actively improve your text pieces of his translations (because the license allows). In the end, we somehow got in touch and from this moment begins the "we" in the history of the project.

We thought long and hard how we can translate together. And not just together, but with the plan to expand the team. Github has disappeared at once. First, a high barrier to entry, and secondly- just uncomfortable. And we gradually moved on notabenoid.

I have a couple times altered website, added that. And then it hit me — we should do a Facebook group and begin to sell themselves to any "Piscine".

Evil is simple enough. A little stepping on the throat of conscience on the subject of "well, not to spam all your band" and "how will look at me people, if I'm going to post links to your website" and here, the band is rapidly gaining popularity, and there is some response from the "fishernet". And here it is, a sharp rise in attendance. And we started coming translators.



the

About anarchist-democratic dictatorship



That is how I can describe the prevailing social system.

When they began to come translators in quantity, it's time to think about hierarchy and about how to organize the translation process.

First, we developed the "guideline" which describes the philosophy of the project, describes the style of the translation, the rules of formatting and given many of the common errors of translators. He sent in a "welcome" letter along with instructions on how to join the project.

Actually, I will tell you, the documentation around the head. Even in a project like ours.

And every Tuesday, as soon as a new release, I'll convert to the desired format, add the translation on notabenoid and mailing for all translators. In the newsletter I usually add in addition to information about the translation some more advice, which I try to adjust the work of the team.
Now, the interpreter has completed the required operation, and is ready to translate.

At first, of course, a translation is not very good, due to the lack of practice. And the practice we have heaps.

Come people I can fall into several categories:"

the

It is clear that the more people, the more chaos, and with the number of people more than one, often it is impossible to come to any decision. So we are in the process of the appearance of people constantly varied structure.

First translated everything, and then I corrected and edited the text and of the translated pieces for publication on the website.

Then I started to translate less and less, as the translation was ready zadroga before I even had the opportunity to do this, the text was ready. And I just had to carry out proofreading and collect the final Yes to transfer images.

And so on.

Now in our team there are translators, and editors (I am, by the way, even hired a proofreader to correct errors in already published articles and the site in General), there are people who collect the text, and I can only subtract it, to transfer pictures and publish. Slowly begins to work the social component of the service for transfers. Pieces of translation are being actively discussed, people vote, in General, is the movement.

the

Statistikaamet



I think this section will be most interesting to site owners, I'd like to tell you about the "promotion" of the project.

I love graphs, they are of any article can do science.

Now the website regularly goes 600 people who browse 3000 pages a day.

The site has 700 RSS subscribers 800 and subscribers Vkontakte.

In the first three days after the release of the site comes in an average of 3500-5000 people.

the


For all time of existence it was visited by 125 000 times and viewed 370 000 pages. And the average person sitting on the site five and a half minutes.



More than half of visitors use Safari/Chrome, quarter — Opera and Firefox, and only 2% use IE. The website comes to approximately 10% of visitors.

I mentioned a couple of methods of promotion: create a group Vkontakte and posting in all kinds of entertainment resources.

OpenID



One of the two most successful solutions, in terms of promotion.

First, a very well-see the user response (the notorious likes) and the users themselves have become clearer. VKontakte provides enough useful statistical tools, which becomes much clearer to the audience of the site. Plus is significantly reduced as the distance between us and the visitors, and between interpreters.

And the role of groups in promoting site is difficult to overestimate, after the publication of Vkontakte, the site comes up to 200 people per hour, this is in my opinion quite a lot.

Entertainment resources



Bad decision. Takes time and effort, and the effect is almost nothing. Individual posts can climb high in the rankings, but the benefit in the form go to the website and/or subscribe to him — no.

My personal opinion: better this type of promotion to give themselves to visitors.

One ring to rule them all



The biggest and most noticeable was the effect of not Vkontakte and not entertainment resources. The biggest was the effect of creating a page with a list of translations.
On average, the addition of this page increased the number of hits almost 3 times.

Most of all the website comes with Habr, Vkontakte, Peekaboo, Twitter, Facebook (so I did not expect).

We even find in the search engines, oddly enough, and Google is much ahead of Yandex.

the

Technical support



The basis of the site we have is Maxsite CMS, a pretty good control system, easy, fast, easily expandable. Purely in order to understand how it is easy when the meteorite fell in Chelyabinsk, we have a peak was 10 requests per second (even statistics have not yet considered properly). But we haven't even started to use the caching capabilities of the CMS, while missing just enabled APC.

The translation itself is running on a platform of service of, the only thing that I personally do not like it: no change history and there is no way of importing text to a website (by the way, nobody in course, they have there API is?). So I have an idea about implementation of such functionality within our website.

As I wrote above, the markup language we use Markdown with a bit filed Markdown Extra extension. What else is there to comment on — I don't know, we are all happy, and the abundance of features (e.g., footnotes) is incredibly happy.

the

project Plans



First, to continue to translate the "What If?".

Second, we plan deprivati non-translated project xkcd.ru comics. For this, I am now developing the platform for translation. There are a number of technical difficulties (e.g. the translation of the 13 gigapixel webcomic, which, if combined into a single file, simply will not work to open in the editor).

Thirdly, to create a more convenient system for the transfer specifically "What If?" with the whistles and poets.
Article based on information from habrahabr.ru

Комментарии

Популярные сообщения из этого блога

ODBC Firebird, Postgresql, executing queries in Powershell

garage48 for the first time in Kiev!

The Ministry of communications wants to ban phones without GLONASS