Delete or hide very outdated translations

[cl8n]

just looking for more opinions on this because it's been a long recurring thought for me, but I don't know if it actually matters

there are some translations that are so outdated to the point of missing major revisions from years ago, that I feel like they may be even less useful to the average reader than a machine translation of the up-to-date EN version. I can't really bring up any concrete case of this bc I only understand english, but knowing what updates some translations don't have is enough for me to be thinking about it.

[MChecaH]

I think this matters to some degree.

While outdated articles may be inoffensive for less important or common articles, I believe there are certain time or content sensitive articles (Like for example the Ranking Criteria, most of the Help and Legal pages, etc...) that could potentially mislead readers if they didn't check the original contents in English. Regardless of the notice about the article being outdated, this could be a problem for those who choose to ignore it.

Maybe deleting them is not the way to go, as some times the old content can be reused. But hiding them (either manually with the use of a new YAML tag, or some sort of timer by default) could probably avoid these issues.

[Hiviexd]

I strongly suggest looking into an automated solution to avoid any potentially large and unnecessary overhead.

we could delist or show a modal warning for translations that have been outdated for +1 year for example.

[cl8n]

"very outdated" isn't a function of time alone, how I'm using it here. I'm mainly concerned about where the translation is misrepresentative enough that it does more harm than good to keep around (intentionally vague statement cuz idk either)

[Hiviexd]

hm, in that case, thoughts on opting for randome's suggestion of using a yaml tag that delists articles (excluded from search/language switcher), but still have them be accessible via permalinks? would be nice if we try to maintain preservation for those who need it instead of outright deleting articles.

[The-Last-Cookie]

For what it's worth, when I joined the wiki a few years ago,¹ I've seen German articles:

• using the formal and informal register even in the same paragraph
• with numerous grammar mistakes and translation issues throughout the whole article
• with parts that were still in English
• containing general inconsistencies and missing/incorrect parts compared to the original article

Footnotes

1. jesus does the time fly ↩