Help:Content translation/Starting/Suggestions
Suggestions of articles to translate are provided on the translation dashboard.
Suggested pages
The list of suggested pages shows a list of topics based on our recommendation system. Suggestions are based on popular articles that are missing on a selected language, and related articles to those you have translated. In addition, high quality articles that are featured in other languages but missing in the current one are also surfaced.
If you find an interesting article to translate, you just need to click on it to start a new translation. A confirmation step will allow you access the article and adjust the languages before starting the translation. This is similar to the regular process to start a new translation, but with all the information already filled in advance.
You can refresh the list of suggested pages to get a new set of suggestions. Every time you refresh a different approach will be used to provide the suggestions. So you can keep refreshing the page and coming back regularly to look for interesting articles to translate.
In some cases you will see a notification with new suggestions based on a recent translation you may have published.
Suggestions are provided for specific language pairs. You can use the language selector at the end of the list header to select the desired languages. Only articles that exist in the source language and are missing in the target one will be shown for you to translate in the list.
For each item on the list, you can discard it or keep it for later. Discarding an item with the "X" icon lets the recommendation system know that it was not interesting for you and will be removed from the list. Keeping items for later with the "star" icon allow you to collect the interesting recommendations for the future, more details on this below.
Keep for later
When you find some interesting articles to translate but you don't have time to start right away, you can always keep them for later by using the "star" icon. This will create a new list with the suggestions that you saved for later. The list of translations "for later" will be persistent, and you can always find it on the suggestions view from the dashboard.
The general list of suggestions is not persistent and changes all the time, so it is recommended to keep the interesting articles you discover for later. This won't block other users from translating these articles and you always have an interesting set of ideas to translate at hand.
More about suggestions
Suggestions are provided by a recommendation system created by the Research team at the Wikimedia foundation in collaboration with Stanford researchers. You can check their scientific publications or their research report to learn more about how the system works internally.
The Wikipedia GapFinder tool is another tool that uses the same recommendation engine used in Content Translation. Initially it shows general suggestions and it does not take into account your previous editing activity, but you can provide one article as an example (or seed) for the engine to provide recommendations that are similar to it. Once you identify a missing article you are interested in, selecting the option to "translate" will take you to Content translation to start a translation for the selected article.
