User:GabrielD2

This account is named in honor of my people's heroine, Évangéline (in English: Evangeline), and her beloved Gabriel. Like them, I am an Acadian, and proud of it. Also like them, I have yet to find my other half, and know full well the pains of being forever separated from my soul mate.

I do speak and read French quite well, though I never learned to write it very well. I hope this may give me a chance to improve that. My English, on the other hand, is quite perfect, unless I'm thinking in French, when the French grammar starts to show.

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This user is a translator from French to English on Wikipedia:Translation.

Pages I've worked on

Fishtronaut Assigned: 08/05/2013 Completed: 08/13/2013 -- My first article assignment, this was clearly a machine-translation of a Portuguese article (which I do not speak!). Fortunately, there were enough English references that I was able to do my own research and figure out what was intended and to fill in the blanks. Also, cleaned-up Peixonauta – Agente Secreto da O.S.T.R.A., a movie based on the T.V. show.
Antoine Portail Assigned: 08/06/2013 English completed and French article updated: 08/14/2013. -- My second assignment happened to be a French article (which I do speak!) that had essentially no content, just a shell with some French text commented out. Translated the French article and added a Background section to explain some key facts necessary for the article to make sense to an English reader.
Diane d'Andoins Found listed on Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English: 08/07/2013 English completed and French article updated: 08/14/2013. -- Reading about translation, I found this article listed, and volunteered to pick it up as my third project. This was a partial translation of the French article. It looks like the original editor started to realize that translation can be hard work, and gave up, just summarizing some of the more difficult passages. So this project needed to have the existing translation reviewed and edited, and the missing sections translated. What made this page extremely hard was that the French article had poor grammar, and key parts of the context were missing, which left the original language open to multiple interpretations. Once I finally found an online source for the public domain article that the French Wikipedia article was initially based on, all became clear. The original source had both proper grammar and some key missing words that resolved the confusion.

Projects -- Working Towards a NEW New User Experpience

After all this hard work, I was a bit underwhelmed to receive as a thank you, the sound of one hand clapping. It hit me as thoughtless and rude. After a few rough experiences, and some disappointing conversations with a rather frustrated old timer, I began to seriously wonder if my contributions were genuinely worth the effort, or if I should put my energies elsewhere. That ultimately lead to my now infamous post in the Teahouse 08/16/2013 "Does Wikipedia REALLY want new users??"

The response lead to my realizing that while the answer may be yes, there is broad understanding that the current process for welcoming new users was badly broken, and in need to redesign. I was given a bunch of links to various resources of all kinds, which I've tried to start organizing below. It's quite interesting that more than half of over 40 links are politically related, not a new user welcome page or program, and not the basic technical info a new user needs to know to edit pages.

I envision this as the start of a process to organize and integrate the new user resources into a comprehensive and easily accessible toolkit. The goal is to provide a NEW user-directed New User Experience that allows the new user to be introduced to Wikipedia according to his/her needs, wants, preferences, goals, abilities, and learning style. The idea is to move away from a monolithic one-size-fits-nobody approach that oversimplifies who our new users are and what they "should" be doing. The NEW New User Experience should respect the diversity of our users, both old-timer and newbie, and our vast array of resources, both currently in existence and under development.

Resources:

Welcome Wagon (directed specifically at new users) (13 items)

Technical (editing, markup, etc.) (6 items)

Political (policies, organizations, etc.) (25 items)

Unsorted

People -- Users I've met (alphabetical order)

Translation