Hi everyone,

People say that spring is a good time to try new things and refresh one’s body and mind. While our site does not really have a body (unless you count the HTML tags…) and its collective mind is made up of all of us (including you, reading these words), it does need refreshing every now and then, mostly due to the nature of the open, living web we are all part of.

That said, let’s get to the details, some of which may sound like Rosana’s post from about 4 years ago.

What’s the proposal about?

The localization coordinators across Mozilla want to consolidate Mozillians and our resources around active locales. In the context of SUMO’s Knowledge Base, this means taking a closer look at the Knowledge Base, which at the moment is available for 76 locales (at least “on paper”).

The proposal is to redirect the mostly inactive locales of the SUMO Knowledge Base to English (or another best equivalent locale). You can find the proposed (draft) list of all the locales here.

23 locales will remain active, with localizers providing good coverage both via Pontoon and SUMO’s Knowledge Base – and no action will be required for them.

In 30 cases, the existing (and historically active) localizers will be contacted to decide on reviving the localization effort for SUMO content. If there is enough interest, they will remain active (with a plan to update content). If there is not enough interest, they will be redirected at the end of June.

In 23 cases, the locales will be redirected at the end of June due to little or no localization activity over an extended period of time. These can also be reactivated at a later time, if need be.

It is important to note that no content created so far would be deleted.

Why do we want to do this?

There are several reasons behind this proposal:

Fewer locales mean more administrator focus on actually active locales – more time for joint projects or experiments, more attention to the needs of localizers putting a lot of time and effort into making SUMO global on a continuous basis. Firefox and the main Mozilla pages have a higher priority than SUMO, so for many localizers it’s better to focus on these projects, rather than getting involved with Knowledge Base localization. The “long tail” locales on SUMO are accessed by a very small number of users each month, so there is little need for serving them at this point. Revisiting this initiative in 6 months will help us see progress made by local communities in building up their active localizer numbers.

What are the next steps?

The 23 locales counted as “no change” will keep functioning as usual, with more locally driven activities coming this year – check the last section of this L10n blog post for just one of the many possibilities.

During April and May, I will reach out to all the contributors listed in SUMO and Pontoon for the 30 locales that are listed as candidates for the clean up – using Private Messages on SUMO or emails listed in Pontoon. Depending on the answers received, we may be keeping some of these locales online, and coming up with a realistic (but ambitious) localization progress timeline for each of them.

At the end of June (after the All Hands), all the locales that are not active will be redirected to English (or another best equivalent locale).

After that, localization for the redirected locales will be focused on Firefox and other Mozilla properties. If there is interest in reactivating a locale, it will happen according to a “re/launch plan” – including creating or participating in a SUMO Knowledge Base sprint event aimed at localizing at least the 20 most popular articles in the Knowledge Base as the minimum requirement, and additional sprints to localize an additional 80 most popular articles.

Is anything else being cleaned up at this stage?

No, the Knowledge Base is a big enough project for now.

Still, this is just the start of this year’s clean up – we will also look into reviewing and reorganizing our contributor documentation, English Knowledge Base, and other properties containing content relevant to SUMO (for example our MozWiki pages).

Please let us know what you think about this in the comments or on our forums: SUMO / Discourse.