New web translator: https://www.e-periodica.ch

[aborel]

Dear all,
this is my attempt at a web translator for the Swiss platform of online journal E-periodica (see https://www.e-periodica.ch/digbib/about1?lang=en ) for more info. This was requested on the Zotero forums https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/426485#Comment_426485 , it seems to work and I hope it meets the expectations:

• retrieve single reference from an article page (provided sufficient metadata is available, which is not always the case for older digitized journals);
• retrieve PDF (free access);
• retrieve multiple refs from a search result page.

Feedback is welcome.

[aborel]

Can anybody take a look, and tell me if further actions are needed?

[adam3smith]

Some questions, some changes requested -- let me know if you have any questions

[aborel]

There are 2 change requests left that still need so work from me, so perhaps it isn't so bad that the lint check on my latest commit has failed.
@adam3smith can you comment on my questions regarding spacing around colons?

[adam3smith]

For the Lint -- it's failing because there have been changes to the CI on the main branch and that confuses the process. If you are able to run
git rebase upstream master locally, that'd very likely fix it.

[aborel]

OK @adam3smith I think I've got everything in order now.

[aborel]

Do I need to do anything else?

[aborel]

@adam3smith Sorry to bother you, but I don't know if I need to do something at this point, or just be patient until an admin takes care of this pull request (among the hundred other ones that are currently open, so some delay would be completely understandable).

[adam3smith]

@aborel -- sorry for the late reply. Nothing else for you to do; just had a busy May and Zotero doesn't have someone working on translators full time right now.

[adam3smith]

Sorry for the delay here -- a couple more smaller change requests, then this should be gtg

[alex-ter]

[...] just had a busy May and Zotero doesn't have someone working on translators full time right now.

@adam3smith, in your opinion, is there anything that could be done by the community to help it? Some things like allowing more people to merge certainly require a very different level of trust, so I'm not talking about that. But maybe there's something like additional testing or reviews, or some such, that would help the maintainers go through the queue quicker, and could be done as some isolated contributions by folks other than maintainers and long-time contributors? I, for one, would be interested.

[adam3smith]

@alex-ter -- I'm probably the wrong person to ask. I don't work for Zotero, I've just done this for many, many years and they know who I am, so I have commit rights here (which I use fairly conservatively, since I'm not a developer -- I just know a bit of javascript and a lot about metadata), and I think any solution really does have to come from Zotero.

They recognize that they need someone working on this quasi full-time, both to improve existing translators and to manage one of the most low-threshold means of community conributions -- that's why they originally hired AbeJellinek, who then (as I understand it) turned out to be so capable that they moved him to more complex tasks. Not sure if they've hire someone else yet, but that was definitely the plan, and it's going to be hard to make real progress working through PRs without that.

That said, I don't know what permission levels GH allows, but from my perspective, giving people who have committed 2-3 good translators, have some other FLOSS experience, and are either identifiable or identify themselves to the dev team e.g. the ability to approve CI runs would be good. I also think encouraging community reviews of submitted translators (again, by people with some track record) makes sense. (Again, though, I think that'd need to come from Zotero)

The one thing that's challenging about this is that the trickiest part about translators is often not the pure code (though obviously that needs to be tight), but getting metadata import right for Zotero's standards, that requires a deep understanding of how metadata is used and otherwise imported -- see e.g. this recent discussion for an example.

This issue is probably not the right place for this discussion, though. Maybe zotero-dev would be -- not entirely sure on that, either.

[alex-ter]

Thank you, that's exactly the insight I was looking for to understand the situation better. This is indeed not the right place for any further discussion (I think zotero-dev is) and I only chimed in here because your comment I quoted was quite aligned with the questions I had after looking at the queue :) Thanks again!

[retorquere]

that said, I don't know what permission levels GH allows

You can get pretty fancy with github actions.

[zoe-translates]

Hello @aborel, I hope you're still working on this. Thank you for your patience.

I added a few comments based on my understanding. Please free to discuss.

[aborel]

@zoe-translates Thanks for the detailed feedback! I'm still very much on board with this, I will study your comments in the next few days.

[aborel]

@zoe-translates Your feedback is integrated. Thanks again for your time!

[zoe-translates]

Thanks! There are just two suggestions (see inline annotation), and I think it's ready after that.

[aborel]

Suggestions were gladly accepted.

[zoe-translates]

LGTM!

[aborel]

Thank you so much @adam3smith and @zoe-translates , I have learnt as lot!

[zoe-translates]

Thank you so much @adam3smith and @zoe-translates , I have learnt as lot!

You never know how much I learn from all the contributions :)

[aborel]

@adam3smith Does anybody need to do anything to clear the "Changes requested" status for this PR?

[dstillman]

Sorry for the delay. Merged — thanks!