432971 - Review of langpacks and dictionaries by locale experts

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Policy, defect)

Description

[Toni Hermoso Pulido]

Dictionaries and langpacks page is a central location of AMO site, which
is easily accessible from several Firefox internal pages and built-in
options. For this reason, great care should be taken in order to warrant
a proper browsing experience for all visiting users which have chosen
Firefox as their primary Web companion.
Sandbox seems the best way to ensure it for the AMO site as a whole, but
the process should be improved at least for linguistic related
extensions as the ones described in this bug title, which are heavily
linked and have a big impact on Firefox users impression of Mozilla quality.
For instance, that's the case of a fake Valencian dictionary which was
submitted some months ago, introduced by political motivations instead
of trying to improve Valencian spellcheking capabilities in Mozilla
products, and it is sadly having a huge negative impact on user
perception of the site.
Since editors can be deceived acting in bona fide, as this has been the
case, and they cannot always be competent in linguistic issues which are
rather alien to their knowledge, I would suggest that there should be
suitable people in charge of reviewing this kind of issues within Sandbox.
I consider locale owners, or other people from their teams, as perfect
candidates for their respective languages. I would also include other
people who are really aware of regional situations in order to act as
additional peers. (as example, Pascal Chevrel for Southern Europe and
Romance languages and Zbigniew for Eastern European ones).
As pointed above, I think this is a necessary procedure in order to
avoid that dictionaries and langpacks list contain inappropriate content
as happens nowadays, and there might be even more on the future if this
is not dealt accordingly.

Comment 1

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

Requiring a review from a locale owner before moving from sandbox -> public is time consuming and (in the case where a locale owner doesn't exist yet) impossible.  The user submitted reviews should help fill the role of quality evaluation and if it becomes necessary (judging from reviews and/or emails) we can get a more thorough review.

Rather than putting the responsibility on the locale owner right at the start we currently allow anyone (including the locale owner) to file a bug under addons.mozilla.org::add-ons about the extension.  When they do they should be very specific about what they object to and cite why it is inaccurate.

I think the time for involving locale owners is after someone files a bug with specific objections - at that point the scope of the problem will be narrowed down enough that locale owners can give a thumbs up or down and we can go from there, rather than having to look at thousands of words in a dictionary.

I know you'd like to talk about the Valencian dictionary specifically but this bug is worded as more of a general policy bug.  For a specific add-on please file a bug about that add-on and not about a general policy.

CC'ing Basil for this bug as he does policy decisions.

Comment 2

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

I'm with Wil here.

Comment 3

[Toni Hermoso Pulido]

I opened a specific bug for the incorrect Valencian dictionary with linguistic and technical info:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=433465

I would personally prefer having more work reviewing than having problems such as the present one, specially when the consequences are public and can have negative impact on user perception if they get more widely known.

Comment 4

[Toni Hermoso Pulido]

I mark it myself as invalid since it was little precise, and we dealt related topics in other bugs.