1298689 - English versions of Firefox Addon creation sites are much too complicated to understand (maybe even for native speakers), so nobody can really translate them

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Developer Documentation Graveyard :: General, defect, P1)

Description

[u578407]

:: Developer Documentation Request

      Request Type: New Documentation
     Gecko Version: unspecified
 Technical Contact: 

:: Details

The "page to update" is just an example. I wondered why there aren't so many translations although there IS a very active German community.
Of course my English isn't perfect, but it is enough for university.
Some sites of Mozilla are much harder than anything we had at university. It seems some lawyers have written the texts.
On Microsoft sites I always switch to the English version to understand something (no matter if it is a Technet site or general ones). Here it wouldn't matter what I choose, it wouldn't do any good.
As developers are FORCED to sign their Addons, it would be nice to give them a chance to understand it. And when the English site is understandable, it would also give the community a chance to translate it.

Comment 1

[Will Bamberg [:wbamberg]]

Other than the page you mentioned, which other pages have this problem?

Comment 2

[u578407]

As Firefox got slower and slower, I switched to another browser. So addon creation for Mozilla products aren't that interesting anymore for me.

To answer your question, take your little brother or sister (or grandparents or whoever else has not much experience with coding) and tell him or her to create an addon for Firefox or Thunderbird or whatever else.

Write down any occuring questions.

This, btw I also tell website developers when they think their website is ready to go online.

As I mentioned [whatever "one year ago" means], there are many sites regarding addon creation that can't be clearly understood. So it would help to start at the beginning and wondering if it can't be written with easier words or if someone who isn't native would be able to understand it or if some 12 year old would be able to understand it.
But you could also have a look at how many translations exist for one site. There will be a reason why there are no translations or only a few.

And tell users interested in addon creation EXACTLY what they have to learn before even thinking about addon creation. I for my part love VB.Net and have some experience with HTML, PHP, Javascript, C#, Java - and still couldn't create an addon.
So whatever your target group for addon creation is, it IS NOT beginners at programming.

Comment 3

[Will Bamberg [:wbamberg]]

As it stands this bug isn't really actionable.

The page originally mentioned *is* hard to read, and *does* read like it was written by lawyers, but that's because it essentially was, since it's a statement of policies for the addons.mozilla.org site. I don't think it should even be on the Wiki.

If there were other pages related to actually learning how to develop add-ons that you could point to specific problems with, we could work on that. But a bug that just says "find out what's wrong and fix it", as comment 2 does, isn't really helpful.