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Once created, a guide seems to be locked down, why?

Hi all,

there are some features that are very puzzling on iFixit.com, to the point where I am wondering if I am the only one noticing them... :-)

For example, I just created a disassembly guide for a Samsung display (https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Disassembli...). Then I decided to save my text and work on it later on.

But... surprise! The guide seems now to be locked down, not only for non-team members (not belonging to the team I am part of) but also to myself! Strange, isn't it?

How is this feature possible? Wiki-driven people could be highly frustrated by this kind of procedures: is it wise to prevent contributors from contributing?

What do you think? Thanks in advance for your help!

Best regards,

David.

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Hi David,

We very much want community members to be able to contribute content! Unfortunately, you're running into the fact that when you're viewing the site in a non-English language, we disable Editing of guides. This is because we don't have good support yet for non-English guides on the site, and mixing them in with English guides would cause us quite a few problems! We're working hard on adding full translation support for guides, but in the mean time, you can edit your guide (and the rest of the site) by visiting it at https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Disassembli... (rather than fr.ifixit.com...).

I hope this helps, and we'll keep working towards guide translation support. In the mean time, we do have translation support for Wikis. So, for example, you should be able to contribute a translation of any Troubleshooting page like this one by using the Start Translation button in the top right: https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/iPhone_4_Tro...

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Got it! :-) Thanks Taylor for the quick feedback. But as far as I understand, this is currently a UI issue, then why should this be also a content issue?

Why not adding a "language tag" to each guide, specifying the language it is written in? In this case, even if the interface itself is in English, this should work fine and allow smooth transition from a monolingual situation (English-speaking UI, English-speaking content) to a full-featured multilingual one (UI in any language, content in any language).

The check for language consistency (ie. avoiding adding English content to a French-speaking guide for example) will be something left to the users (and believe me, this should be sufficient because very few people will find this language mixing amusing.) There is also the possibility of adding a "mixed translation flag" to allow user reporting any inconsistencies.

In fact, this language issue is quite urgent: our French-speaking Repair Café community (in Belgium, France, Switzerland and many African countries) is growing and eager to document stuff in French! If they can't, they might switch to homemade inefficient wikis and I think this will not serve the world repair cause well...

Thanks in advance for your comments and extra infos.

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We really appreciate your feedback, and you've got some great ideas! The the reason it's a complex content issue is that the "right" way to build this system is to have, for example, one iPhone 5s Display Replacement guide (let's call it guide #1234), with many translated versions of that guide. All translated versions of guide #1234 should share the exact same pictures and videos, etc on steps, with only the bullet text changing. Then, for French and English translations, rather than having two completely unrelated guides that are in different languages, we would have two translations of the same guide. Changing an image in one guide would update it in all translated versions.

The short term "hack" would be as you describe: to add a language tag of some sort to every guide, and we are actually planning on rolling that out soon. We'll keep you updated when we do.

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David Bourguignon will be eternally grateful.