Terminology: "least recently changed" confusing

[Yuv]

IN the process of evaluating Launchpad as a bug tracker for our Open Source project, I collected feedback from our varied, international community.

A non-native speaker reported "least recently changed" as sorting order in the bug tracker to be confusing. As non-native speaker myself I can confirm.

Suggestion: "last changed" instead of "most recently changed" and "first changed" instead of "least recently changed". May not be elegant, but more people understand last/first than least/most.

[Deryck Hodge (deryck)]

This fix for this is easy -- i.e. changing the terms in the form. The hard part is getting agreement on what terms are better.

[Yuv (yuv)]

Sorry for dropping such a hot potato. If you want, just mark this as (my) "Opinion" and let it be forgotten on the heap of wont-fix-bugs. I was just giving you my opinion based on my experience of working on three continents and in five languages, and on the feedback I had from our developers.

[Deryck Hodge (deryck)]

Hi, Yuv.

It's not a hot potato, and I didn't mean to suggest you had offered a bad idea for the wording. My comments were only meant for whoever comes along to work on this. I was only trying to suggest that it may be hard to really fix this because coming up with language this is clear for everyone might be hard to do, but the actual technical work involved in the fix is easy, which is why I used the easy tag.

Thanks for the bug report and the suggestions!

Cheers,
deryck

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

The bad wording is my fault, because I couldn't think of anything better at the time. And I haven't thought of anything obviously better since. "First changed" would be ambiguous because it could be interpreted as sorting by the date on which the bug report was first changed, rather than the date on which it was last changed.

Maybe "most neglected"?

[Yuv (yuv)]

Hi Matthew. "most neglected" is good. Definitely rings a bell in both Anglo-Saxon and Latin languages and is less confusing than "least recently changed".

I don't think it is "bad" wording, nor that it is anyone's fault. It is the wording that worked at the moment it was implemented and things can always improve.

[Launchpad QA Bot (lpqabot)]

Fixed in stable r13312 <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/stable/revision/13312>.

[Yuv (yuv)]

Wow, I had already forgotten about this report of mine. Thank you for showing me it was not in vain. How can I help with QA?

I see the production version of LP that is presented to me(and that I am happy to use frequently) is r13299. I'll happily do the QA testing for you if you can point me to a >r13312 version.

I'd have a bigger terminology "bug" to report. I know that the canonical way to place a new report is to open a new ticket item, and indeed here it is, bug #802953. It is probably more complex to fix than this one. Thank you for the consideration that you will give to it, if any.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

@Yuv you should be able to try this out now on https://qastaging.launchpad.net

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

"Most neglected" is cute, but I think it is a worse term.

Non-English-speaking users were the original reason for this bug being filed, and if somebody doesn't know the word "most" I seriously doubt they will know the word "neglected".

Secondly, "neglected" has connotations beyond just being not recently touched. A bug that was fixed a long time ago is not neglected. A bug that was correctly marked confirmed/wishlist and not touched since is not neglected either.

(Adding a concept of "neglect" would be interesting -- perhaps pointing to something that's been commented by users but not read by developers -- but this is not it.)

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

... I realize it has already merged, but I think it should be pulled back out.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 8:53 AM, Martin Pool <email address hidden> wrote:
> ... I realize it has already merged, but I think it should be pulled
> back out.

If its a severe enough issue, mark this qa-bad. Otherwise I suggest
pinging the person that changed it directly.

-Rob

[Yuv (yuv)]

I have looked at the changes in qastaging and everything seem to work as
intended as far as the drop down selection goes. The search results are the
same in production and in staging.

On June 28, 2011 04:48:20 PM Martin Pool wrote:
> "Most neglected" is cute, but I think it is a worse term.

what makes you think so? what is your mother tongue? and what other
languages have you experienced? FYI I am fluent in five languages with Hebrew
mother tongue, Italian schooling tongue, German university tongue, been living
in French (first France then French Canada) for ten years and am now living in
English Canada. I have exposure to a few other languages as well and was able
at an earlier point in my life to order beer and a sandwitch in Finnish.

> Non-English-speaking users were the original reason for this bug being
> filed, and if somebody doesn't know the word "most" I seriously doubt
> they will know the word "neglected".

While I perceive the current version as less optimal than my initial
suggestion, it is IMHO a step forward.

"Neglect" shares same roots and meaning with English in most latin languages.
look up "negligenza" (Italian) or "negligence" (French). The translation of
the "most" concept on the other hand requires a change of root.

My argument could be taken apart by the fact that my references are only a few
latin and ango-saxon languages plus Hebrew (for which all of this discourse is
pretty irrelevant) - a minuscule fraction of all the languages out there.

Nevertheless French is one of the most common foreign languages due to its
colonial past. It is geographically complimentary to English as a foreign
language. Get a term that has the same recognizable root in both and chances
are good that non-native will find a way to understand.

> Secondly, "neglected" has connotations beyond just being not recently
> touched. A bug that was fixed a long time ago is not neglected. A bug
> that was correctly marked confirmed/wishlist and not touched since is
> not neglected either.

My understanding is that "neglect" refers to the ticket, not to the bug
itself.

> (Adding a concept of "neglect" would be interesting -- perhaps pointing
> to something that's been commented by users but not read by developers
> -- but this is not it.)

Please consider the benefits against the drawback of extra complexity.
Complexity is the #1 obstacle to communication. The #2 is painful nitpicking
on precise grammar and ortograph. Not that I do not care about them, but one
has to see the order of priority. First get your message across, second do it
syntactically correct. Not the other way around. Syntax, grammar,
dictionnary evolve, and people attach new meanings to old word or old meanings
to new world. Go back to the seventies and speak of a mouse or of googling up
something.

So my two cents are:
first preference - please consider my initial proposal "last changed" / "first
changed". a simple sort tweet that says it all.
second preference - the recent change. better than the status quo in term of
ambiguity (least vs. last).

as usually: it's your tool, you rule. i am just a user thankful for the
excelle...

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

So your specific point here is that people who are not completely
fluent in English may confuse "last" (most recent) with "least recent"
(the opposite) because of the one-character difference between the
words?

Launchpad's UI is in English. Second-guessing how non-English
speakers are going to interpret words seems like a losing game, and
micro-optimization. "Neglected" may be easier for you, but harder for
Chinese users.

I dislike "neglected" because it implies a concept that is not
implemented in the software. It sorts by last change date, not by
neglect, and not by what I would expect "neglect" to mean.

It would be better to just make the sort UI more transparent, or to
i18ze the ui, than to fiddle with this.

> So my two cents are:
> first preference - please consider my initial proposal "last changed" / "first
> changed".  a simple sort tweet that says it all.

How about "recently changed" and "not recently changed"?

[Matthew Revell (matthew.revell)]

I mentioned in the merge proposal that I felt "Most neglected" was less than perfect but it seemed to be simpler than "Least recently changed".

On reflection, I think "Least recently changed" is better than "Most neglected". Without some evidence from people for whom English is not their first language, I think we should be reluctant to change the wording to something that promises more than the search actually delivers.

I'm tempted to say "Won't fix" and to suggest that we revert the change.

Perhaps "Recently changed" and "Not recently changed" are better than what we have here but I can't get particularly passionate about the change.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

Thanks, Matthew!

To be fair, Yuv does have some of this evidence since English is not his mother tongue, and from other users he works with. So I accept that it's confusing to them, and having grasped the last/least thing I can see why. I just don't think "neglected" is an unalloyed improvement.

[Yuv (yuv)]

On June 29, 2011 09:55:43 AM Martin Pool wrote:
> How about "recently changed" and "not recently changed"?

excellent, and IMHO better than my initial suggestion and anything else
discussed so far in this thread.

As far as i18zing the whole UI, my opinion is strongly against it. The Babel
tower.

Projects need one single common language and in the 21st century this lingo is
a bastardization of English because of the geopolitical facts on the ground.

Translation is better accomodated at a different level.

Yuv

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

Thanks for your constructive persistence.

> Projects need one single common language and in the 21st century this lingo is a bastardization of English because of the geopolitical facts on the ground. Translation is better accomodated at a different level.

True.

[Yuv (yuv)]

On June 30, 2011 05:39:17 AM Martin Pool wrote:
> Thanks for your constructive persistence.

I would find it very impolite to drop a bomb in the bug tracker and disappear.
If the report disappears I tend to set this kind of bugs to incomplete status
and let it disappear with them.

Besides the difficulty to display it (using Kmail and using Firefox on Kubuntu
11.04) I like what I see in the screenshot you posted.

Thank you for giving me, and particularly to this seemingly small issue, your
attention.