Lurkers…

001aWhat a horrible name… lurkers!  It carries all kinds of negative connotations from science fiction monsters to the stuff of nightmares where we think of spying and being followed by something or someone we don’t like.  Of course I’m not using this term in these contexts so I better explain.  I’m talking about communities and user participation, or more specifically about users who read and observe but rarely contribute to the conversations at all.

Community managers often think about user participation based on a 90:9:1 rule where 90% of users are referred to as lurkers who read all the activity but don’t contribute themselves, 9% contribute from time to time and 1% are pretty active and probably account for most of the contributions.  I guess I can see why this negatively charged name is used, but in addition to being a horrible name it doesn’t really do justice to how important this group of community users are.

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The beauty of simplicity…

001In 2013 I wrote an article called “Solving the Post-Edit Puzzle” which was all about finding a way to measure, and pay for post-editing translations in a consistent way.  Then in 2015 I wrote another called “Qualitivity… measuring quality and productivity” that was all about everything Post-Edit Compare could do but then added many layers of detail and complexity through Qualitivity to support Quality Measurement including a TAUS DQF integration, and incredible metrics that are still not matched by any tool today that I am aware of, and are so good that they are often used to support academic research into translating and post-editing behaviour.

This is all great stuff and I have always been a huge fan of the work that Patrick Hartnett has done on all of the applications he developed over the years.  You don’t often find experienced developers with indepth domain knowledge like this and his apps have always been really relevant to solving problems in the localisation workplace.  So I wanted to bring up and discuss the app that was actually the predecessor to these great apps I just mentioned.  It was also an app that was no longer supported once it’s first successor, Post-Edit Compare, was released.  The app was released around 2011 I think and was called SDLXLIFF Compare.

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