Can we delete all tags from translated content yet?

[peterbe]

This is a "fork" of https://github.com/mdn/content/discussions/5805
That discussion talks about what to do with tags. We've learned the following there:

1. Only a handful of tags are actually used in en-us.
2. It seems the translated contents' tags are never used. E.g. the CSS sidebar for fr uses the documents in en-us to figure out which slugs to include.
3. Tags are not used for site-search (peter's note: this one I'm 100% confident of)
4. We don't have any plans for doing site-search by tag (peter's note: this one I'm 99% confident of)
5. If we remove the tags key from the translated content front-matter, when built in KS, it will automatically pick up the en-us's tags from its front-matter.
6. There are 5,263 translated index.html files that specify tags: in their front-matter. (it totals ~400KB as a combined string)

I propose that we delete all tags: front-matter from all the translated content.
It will make it less confusing for translators who might think they have to keep this pristine and/or translated.

[peterbe]

Fishing for feedback
@wbamberg @Rumyra @SphinxKnight @Elchi3 @fiji-flo @escattone

[hamishwillee]

Vote +1 from me.

• In fact you should remove all front matter that can be inferred from the US version. That would probably just leave the title and maybe the slug. Right?
  [Edit: and I guess @teoli2003 agrees based on "By the way, shouldn't browser-compat-data being maintained only on en-US too?)"]
• Can we prevent tags from being re-added?

If we're not using them as tags for search or categorising all they can do is harm data quality. As discussed in #524 it would be much better if we added separate meaningful keys for most of these.

[SphinxKnight]

* In fact you should remove **all** front matter that can be inferred from the US version. That would probably just leave the title and maybe the slug. Right?
  [**Edit**: and I guess @teoli2003 agrees based on "By the way, shouldn't browser-compat-data being maintained only on en-US too?)"]

+1 for this. I'd be inclined to treat any inferred front matter material the same way and if confusion is a source of concern, as for myself, I'd be more confused having only the tags removed. Currently, adding a new localized docs consists of copying/pasting the en-US folder and adding the translation_of key,. Only dealing with tags could seem a bit strange.

I don't want to sidetrack here but as I understand it, ultimately only title should differ from en-US to localeX.

If we look at the front matter keys (that I know of), I'm not even sure original_slug should be kept theoretically speaking. For non-conflicting/orphaned docs:

• slug : must be the same as en-US (can be inferred from the path in the tree)
• tags : needless to say more, can be deleted
• translation_of : key duplicates slug (again, for non-conflicting/orphaned docs)
• original_slug : lives better off in redirects.txt

* Can we prevent tags from being re-added?

This can be part from the review (though this does not prevent to add a check/flaw to help)

[peterbe]

That's right, only title makes sense. Everything else can and should be inferred. But how we get there is a different story.

• tags is only ever used in kumascript rendering, but slug and translation_of etc. might be needed by the Yari builder before it even gets into the kumascript rendering.
• the translation_of and original_slug might need to survive a little bit longer until we've git rm 'ed all the orphaned and conflicting translations.
• If you rename a file in en-us, the existing translations won't necessarily know about that yet, but that's what sync-translated-content does even though I don't fully understand it. Or rather, I've already forgotten how it works.
• For all content, en-US and the translated content, we want to get rid of the slug or at least only keep it if can't be exactly like the folder it sits in.

[hamishwillee]

Cool. I think you can delete the flags. I would find it useful to know that fixing the rest is still on your radar (e.g. an issue or whatever).

[peterbe]

As an update, I'm in the processing of deleting all the documents that have conflicting or orphaned in the slug.
See https://github.com/mdn/translated-content/pulls?q=is%3Apr+%22delete+conflicting%22+
Once that's done, it definitely no longer makes sense for any of the translated content to have any front-matter that is not title.
But I'd need to sleuth with @fiji-flo about what it means if you rename a en-US doc (which involves both git mv ... and editing the slug) but haven't done so yet with the translated content.

Perhaps, with that in mind, it does not makes sense to start with deleting all the tags just to get that out of our hair because you'd be roping in a lot of translator reviewers twice then.

In other news, I'm getting much closer now to enabling Preview URLs and the Review Companion to all translated content PRs. That'd make any cleanup efforts a lot smoother.