From announcement post:
Hi, I am a locale leader of SUMO Japanese community. I have contributed to the Support over 20 years, before the beginning of support.mozilla.org.
Today, November 4, we decided to end our SUMO Japanese community.
In October 22, the sumobot was introduced to Japanese KB articles. I cannot accept its behavior and no words.
- It doesn’t follow our translation guidelines.
- It doesn’t respect current localization for Japanese users, so they were lost.
- It approves its direct English MT immediately for All archived KB articles.
- It approves only in 72 hours after its updates, so we lost our work to train new contributors.
- It has been working now without our acceptance, without controls, without communications.
- Over 300 Knowledge Base articles are overridden by sumobot.
They are all happened on the product server, not on staging server. I understand that this is mass destruction of our work and explicit violation to the Mozilla mission, allowed officially.
Therefore, I (marsf) declare:
- I quit to contribute to support.mozilla.org.
- I prohibit to use all my translation as learning data for SUMO bot and AIs.
- I request to remove all my translation from learned data of SUMO AIs.
However, individual Japanese contributors may want to work in their responsibility. It is their choice, we don’t care nor support.
Bye.
Based on some of the reactions from other translation teams it seemed linked to a bug specific to Asian languages though. I didn’t read all of the comments because some wrote half a novel, but while this absolutely sucks it sounds more like a botched attempt at introducing the sumo bot than a deliberate slight.
When you introduce a bot that can and will revert any human-made translation, even if the translation is fine, then that’s a huge middle finger to a community that is over two decades old. They could have rolled out the new bot on a staging server to test, discuss, and improve how the SUMO Bot could lend the community a hand, but instead, they decided to deploy it directly on the live server without any communication.
The bug caused the SUMO bot to revert already translated content back to English. So that doesn’t really have anything to do with why everyone is upset.