translations as games

[Jeroen Vermeulen]

Tom Davies wrote:

> However, the graphics and statistics don't get updated automatically so 
> it seems a bit of a waste of time bothering with the nice graphic and 
> stats which are clearly inaccurate - requiring more unrewarded human 
> effort which only gets grumbles.  Its a shame that something so pretty 
> and so close to being a motivating force is used only to create extra 
> (pointless) work.  Clearly there is a lot of hard work going into all of 
> this.  Lets show that.

If any of those statistics don't get updated automatically, that is a 
bug.  If that's really the case we'd appreciate a detailed bug report!

But there are some things that can make it just *look* as if statistics 
are not updated.  Given how much data Launchpad processes, there has to 
be a lot of caching in lots of places--from our database server all the 
way to your browser--and some things have to be computed offline.

For Ubuntu in particular, there is a huge amount of data to process.  So 
we update its high-level statistics once a day.  You do make a powerful 
(and original!) argument for speeding that process up and running it 
more often.  A word of caution though: engineering time is limited, and 
what we spend on one problem we can't spend working on something else.

With optimization it's notoriously hard to predict how much result 
you'll get for how much time.  There is even a risk of slowing things 
down by optimizing them, or triggering failures as the same data is 
updated simultaneously from different angles.  There are things we can 
do to counteract that, but that brings us back to that unpredictable 
bang-to-buck ratio.


Jeroen