Official Project Update #16

[doranwen]

I finished all the German categories and have been going through Portuguese ones. Oddly enough, unlike the other categories, the Portuguese ones started out somewhat jumbled, though it seems to have stabilized mostly going through top-level categories one at a time (but in reverse order alphabetically, chunk by chunk). After the Portuguese, the only language directory that's left is French, which I suspect will be relatively smaller overall.

I did find a new language—Cape Verdean Creole—I think! Google Translate thought it was Brazilian Portuguese but it's definitely not and all research that volunteers did for me seems to turn up Cape Verdean Creole, so I'm assuming that must be it. Hopefully we can find someone who can read it in order to tag it properly.

This will be, I believe, the final update for metadata sorting until I'm finished. If my calculations are correct, the 95% mark will occur in the middle of the final category, which is the massive NULL one (groups for which we have no information on category path, category, or categoryid). Sorting this category will go remarkably fast, because there are only three possibilities: we have at least a partial description which can be used to tag (likely to be very rare), we have no info but we have the GMD so the mboxes can be looked at (also probably rare), or we have no info at all (the most likely). The first can stay on the appropriate language tab, the second and third go to Unknown. After that, I have only the final 1-2% to handle - finalizing all the smaller language tabs (including some that turned out to have far more groups than I imagined and will require splitting into multiple tabs). I can't wait to be done with this stage!


Actual stats:

Now up to 90.00% sorted and 2.89% tagged.

Available tabs:

English: 3254
Spanish: 388
Portuguese: 269
Italian: 88
German: 76
French: 8
Chinese: 59
Indonesian/Malay: 130
Arabic: 54
Persian: 16
Turkish: 63
Romanian: 35
Unknown: 281
Spam: 31


Something fun:

Yahoo Groups were used to host hundreds of groups containing downloads of custom content for The Sims. Such groups could be found in many languages, as the group "the_sims_downloads" shows:

Comunidade destinada à downloads do jogo The Sims 1,2,3 e no futuro 4.
Este grupo aqui no yahoo, é para fazer downloads dos jogos da série The Sims(TS1,TS2 e no futuro TS3).
Aqui terão vários tipos de downloads e também dicas sobre os jogos da série The Sims.

Comments

[duskpeterson]

You are a workhorse! Very admirable.

[doranwen]

I'm afraid of the hdds all dying (I have one set of backups but I can't afford a second) before I can get it all uploaded! And I've got multiple other projects on hold, waiting until I don't have to have 26 spreadsheets open at all times. It takes up three of the five workspaces on my desktop, and even part of a fourth. And all of those office documents take up heaps of RAM all the time. So any time I think "I don't want to work on Yahoo Groups" all of that flashes through my head and it's excellent motivation.

[duskpeterson]

"And I've got multiple other projects on hold"

All the more admirable!