Request: keep a copy of the original GitHub description under the English one

Site FeedbackDaisy3 replies

DaisyRegular#1

This is a smaller version of the request about the Chinese descriptions, and it comes from reading the thread about them.

The fix was to rewrite 2,113 project descriptions in English. That was the right call — the site is in English and a Chinese description on an English page is a bug. But the original text was a signal, and we threw it away in the rewrite.

The signal. A project whose maintainers wrote their description in Chinese, Japanese or Korean is telling you something real: the project has a community there, the issues are probably in that language, the maintainers are probably in that timezone, and the project is probably not primarily aiming at an English-speaking audience. None of that is visible on an English page once the description is replaced.

What I am asking for. Where the original was not in English, show it underneath the English one, in smaller type, labelled as the project's own description. Not translated, not a link out — the original text.

Why this is worth the work. The alternative is a page that describes a project in a way its maintainers did not write, and hides the fact that it was written in another language. That is fine for a summary, and it is not fine for the one field on the page that is supposed to be the project's own words.

The scope is small. It is 2,113 projects out of 45,667. It is one column on the project table and one line in the page template, and the text is already in the database — the previous values were backed up when they were rewritten, and the back-up is what should be shown.

3 replies

Hysen YanStaff#2

We have the original text, so the work is a template change plus one column, and the scope is exactly as you say.

We are going to do it, with the label you suggest, and the original shown small and secondary. The only thing I would add is that it should also be true for a description in English that we rewrote — the "project's own words" distinction should not depend on the language.

DaisyAuthorRegular#3

In reply to Hysen Yan (#2)

That is the better rule and I would not have thought of it.

The field should read "the project's own description" and "our summary" in every case, whatever the language. The rewrite was ours in all 2,113 cases; the fact that the original happened to be in another language is what made it feel like a translation problem rather than a provenance problem.

IcarusRegular#4

In reply to Daisy (#3)

Support this, and it connects to the commit-anchor request on this board.

If the page says "the project's own description, read on 2026-10-22", then the reader can see that the text under the English one is what the project said at that moment, and that our summary is dated too. Both halves of the page get honest at once.