Re: Debian website translations: old files removed, and later re-added, causing extra translator's work

[Thomas Lange <lange@cs.uni-koeln.de>]

Hi Holger,

I think I do not understand clearly what is a waste of time in your
opinion. My removals or readding these pages?
I will explain my point of view.

I removed the translation for most old releases, because I think it's
not worth to keep these translations. I like to keep only the english
version for old releases. I removed the hamm translations in Sep 2023,
but later the translators of portuguese, dutch, french and russian
decided to readd the translations. This was their decision and I did
not stopped them (what I would have liked to do). But in Debian it's
not clear how can make such decisions.


Here are some statistics about the russian translation and the english
pages:

The numbers are GET requests from the last two weeks on all
our web servers, status only 200, excluding a long list of bot names.


  49055 /releases/
    775 /releases/index.en.html
   1234 /releases/index.ru.html

Nearly 50.000 hits for the english version of the main Debian releases
web page which lists a releases. 1234 for russian.


  21026 /releases/bookworm/
  12969 /releases/stable/
    116 /releases/bookworm/index.ru.html

33.000 hits for english for our stable release but only 116 for the
russian translation.

And now for the our oldest release called hamm:

    477 /releases/hamm/
     34 /releases/hamm/errata
      5 /releases/hamm/index.ru.html
      4 /releases/hamm/errata.ru.html


A deeper look at the 5 hits of releases/hamm/index.ru.html shows:
-1 for a bot which was not in my list
-1 for an IP address which points to googlebot
-1 access came from a domain, that is a redirection of our whole web site

That means the russian translation for the hamm release was accessed
maybe by two people in two weeks.
Was it worth to readd this translation?

Shouldn't the translators spend their time on content which is more
important?

If you think the statistics at
https://www.debian.org/devel/website/stats should exclude more pages,
that's very easy to do. Just add some regex to the global .transignore
file.

Maybe we need some advice to translator what is important and what not.
Or are rules (more strict) are needed?

-- 
best regards Thomas