Translation mailing list activity

Translation mailing list activity

Introduction

Noticed that the messages from Fedora translation mailing list is much less than before after the L10n platform had moved from Transifex to Zanata. So I decided to use simple R commands to see the monthly activity of the mailing list in 12 years since it's started.

Activity

The only indicator I used to measure the activity is the monthly archive size of the mailing list. You can see it from here[1].  I think it's easy to get and it is a good indicator. The higher the size is, the more active the mailing list is.

Tools and code

R and some r packages are used for reading the archive webpage and making the plot. If you are interested, please see the code here[2].

Result

The figure shows that the archive size was relatively stable during 2008 to 1st quarter 2011. After that, the monthly archive size is no more than 50 KB. Except a peak in July, 2014, when huge discussions were on Transifex's proprietary and moving to Zanata.  In fact, the other L10n platform migration process made a peak in March, 2011. That is the migration to transifex.net.

Conclusion

It seems that each migration of the L10n platform would result in lower activity in the mailing list. The potential reason for this may because of the loss of active translators. Some of the translators may refuse to migrate to the new platform or they couldn't contribute for other reasons.

The contributors don't contribute for money, but a credit is a good reward to them. However, lots of the credits were lost in two migrations above. The translated strings comes with the information like "translated by anonymous". Sad, isn't it? No contributor wants to be a anonymous unless he/she plans to do some hacker activities.

[1] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/trans/
[2] https://github.com/tiansworld/mailinglistactivity