RE: Talk to the CEO - Utopian Translations Category
I'm not a member of Utopian Translation Team neither Davinci Team, but here are my thoughts.
My first question could be "How do you decide which language should be added next?" There are some languages I don't even heard before, it could be my ignorance but there are more widely used languages and people waiting for those languages to be included in translation categories.
- Is there any scenario you would like to mention which wasn't properly handled?
Unfortunately I'm not familiar with how all the process going on on translations category. However being in a small group of team may cause some overlooking issues? There are usually 3 translators with 1 moderators afaik, and who suppose to check everything going well on each category.
- Is there any sign of abuse from one or more members in your team or in other teams?
I saw many contributions with missing informations, like they even forgot to put their own crowdin profile and I never seen they are warned about it. Plus those projects are usually open to only team members so it's hard to check the work done from outside.
- What else you would like to share with me?
It's weird that more than half of the contributions are translations, that makes me think if it's too easy to get rewards through translating and if it needs to be adjusted according to it. I know that 400+ words is enough to get a reward. Which was 2k once upon a time, IIRC.
If the project is closed, a less intuitive but a way to do random checks is by going to the project's activity page:
It sucks, but it's better than nothing
Additionally;
I found many (like MANY) weird transfers to the same exchanges, between translators and moderators, odd behaviors on accounts like having zero comments on the blockchain, zero interactions but almost hundreds of translation contributions. Some of them doesn't even have a profile picture, but started directly with Utopian and only continue to translate through Utopian and nothing else.
With some languages it will be hard to know for sure if the people are genuine. I for one, don't know a thing about Vietnamese, so unless we know the LM longer and trust him/her, we can just never be sure if the translators are all genuine (and with that I am not saying it's that particular team who is doing any crazy transfers...I just gave an example). So I think @elear's idea of bringing in external translation experts to do checks sometimes might be the best solution for this.
I believe the decision is based upon availability of LMs for those languages and their actual expertise. Additionally the voting distribution may not be enough to expand too fast and some languages may have to wait longer than others. Is there any specific example of languages should be considered first?
I proposed this idea recently with the core team: to have periodical audits, undertaken by teams . of external professionals who aren't in any way linked to the existing teams, to reduce bias and mitigate potential abuses.
This is a good point. Definitely to be brought up with the DaVinci management
Translators will disagree. There have been improvements to the questionnaire to make it more granular and this component has been made more significant for the calculation of the final score.
Would you mind creating a list and share it with me if you are available for that?
https://hackmd.io/ek2E1Er1Sp-9VZecZweccQ here is the list, sorry it took long. And might be quite messy, I tried my best to keep it objective and clean as possible. Didn't include any personal opinion, you just need to take a further look if you find anything suspicious, I don't know like their first transactions on steemd, who they batch-voted, batch followed just after the account creation. Voting behaviours on steemreports, transfers in detail on steemworld.
cc: @elear @scienceangel @egotheist @imcesca @dimitrisp @jmromero @rosatravels @aboutcoolscience
Thanks @oups for putting in this extra effort to help us. We appreciate this information and will do research on them.
Thank you very much @oups for putting together such an exhaustive list. If I saw correctly, there almost were no teams without at least some transfers between members. This should be definitely investigated more deeply to see what was the purpose of all those transfers between the members of teams.
One such list has been shared if the sources I saw are correct. Were any actions taken as a reaction to the list?
Great, I'm not trying to undervalued their work in no way. It's just there are too many translation contributions. Possibly because there are too many translators but this is how utopian.rocks looks like,
Since I'm Turkish :) not that I'm going to translate but I'd like to see it amongst the allowed languages since there are already many of the languages there, then why not Turkish, simple man's logic.
Sure, it could take some time tho. I occasionally checked a few languages, now it's time to practice more Python and provide the whole list. 👍
Hi @oups, thank you very much for your interest to help us improve Translations category and prevent abuse. These are very serious accusations:
As one of the LMs, I fully support providing a list with names of LMs/Translators who are responsible for such behavior, followed by detailed check of their accounts in search for evidence.
In case such accusations turn out to be true and proven, those people should be immediately suspended from their positions.
Thanks as well for not getting it in wrong way, I'm just trying to do the right thing. I'm not actually want to accuse anyone but make things more transparent to be able to increase the level of trust.
Can you DM me the names of the translators/moderators via Discord?
Sure thing, after I compiled the whole list. I'll share it with anyone interested..
Count me in too, please.
I'm interested too, so hit me up when you're done compiling the list 😉
If you suspect that some users may be abusing the system please try to contact us directly to avoid that the message gets lost or distorted by the time it reaches us. Regarding the choice of the teams to activate it depends on several factors, from the quality of the applications to the abuse history of the team. For example we were told that the Turkish team committed several abuses in the past so we have been extra careful before activating the team. I think the newest Turkish applications we received are pretty decent but please read the comments above, users are already complaining that we are too many, you also said it yourself that we have too many translation contributions, so we must alternate periods of growth and consolidation. Now we are in a consolidation phase and we need to fix a few things before bringing more people in.