A couple of thoughts occur to me.
The solution on github seems to be Javascript-reliant, which can run
into script-blocking issues. I don't know what proportion of visitors
might be using computers with script-blocking, and what proportion of
those would think/know how to/have permissions to overcome it. Or using
computers/browsers where JS is inclined to break. It might be
completely minimal, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
For a GeoIP solution, this relies on good information about what
languages are relevant to GeoIPs. Do we have such a good set of data?
I'm thinking particularly of language communities outside their
traditional homelands, Cantonese in Liverpool for example. Also,
language density is a complicating factor. If you use a list of 10
languages based on GeoIP, then in some areas it's more than enough,
while in others it's a fraction of the local languages. I'm not sure
what the best way to overcome that one is.
I'm also concerned that a measure like this will tend to reinforce the
dominance of major languages on the net. People will not necessarily
take that extra step to check the language list just in case their
language is on it, especially for lesser-wikified languages; adding an
extra step always pretty much makes things more unlikely. I wonder
whether the huge list we see at present encourages people to search for
their own language, while a small list that doesn't immediately show it
is less encouraging. The many wiki-readers who don't edit will
presumably not have any preferences saved, so would potentially have to
set their language choices every visit - or might simply not bother if
it's unlikely to offer many articles anyway. So they would simply read
the English/French/Russian articles, and the minority wikis would be
further neglected and the language further undermined. This is
obviously all speculation; I'd be interested to see any hard information
on this. It's a different set of problems from those of interlang
editors but one worth considering, particularly as you're talking about
making this the default. Minority languages have a hard enough time as
it is...
In terms of link ordering, it would perhaps make sense for articles
related to a particular language to emphasise those links (either in a
"Relevant to this article" section, or by formatting of some kind)? So
articles on French people, things and places might highlight French -
although of course there's other French languages to consider so that
could get complicated.
--Shimmin
On 19/04/2013 10:05, സുനിൽ (Sunil) wrote:
I suggest the list of languages should be displayed according to the
size/quality also
On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 3:43 AM, Yuri Astrakhan
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
There are a few things (IMO) that should be done to langlist ordering:
* Group by alphabet
People who understand latin alphabet should get a list of all
latin-using languages listed/sorted together. Cyrillic is a
separate group, and so are various asian and middle-eastern
languages. I have seen other sites do this (e.g. Google, but I
can't quickly locate an example right now). Having all languages
bunched up together make going through them extremely painful -
one has to skip all the scripts not understood.
* Each wiki site has different ordering requirements - like Hebrew
and Hungarian wikis want English as the first link, or 'nn' uses
'no','sv','da' before all others. See pywiki
<http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/pywikipedia/trunk/pywikipedia/families/wikipedia_family.py>
- interwiki_putfirst
* Lastly, but IMO - most importantly, we should honor user
settings or browser settings. If my browser sends *Accept
Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,ru;q=0.6*, it would be good to show
english & russian at the top, followed by others.
All this can (and should) be done in javascript, without affecting
servers.
And for historical reasons: bug 2867
<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2867>... i filed
it in 2005, it has over 60 votes (highest count in bugzilla if i'm
not mistaken)...
--Yuri
On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 9:57 PM, Brion Vibber <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I was traditionally in favor of keeping the full language list
visible,
but.... it's just too damn big in many cases and is hard to
search through
on any device. On touch devices it's difficult to pick a
correct item from
the list as all the links are adjacent (though if you zoom
it's ok).
Definitely we need something improved, and if we're going to
improve it we
need to do it for the default or we're failing to serve 99% of our
readers...
I'm not sure about the current demo; one thing that bugs me is
that there's
a very small tap/click target for getting the full language
list call-out.
Clicking on "Language" just hides/shows the short list, it
doesn't do
anything. Clicking the "settings" gear icon next to
"Languages" brings up a
call-out with language-related settings.... none of which help
you get to
another language version of the wiki.
On the mobile site we've collapsed the whole thing to an
"Other languages"
section or button (depending on if you're in beta mode) at the
bottom of
the article, and this seems to have gotten good usability
responses from
mobile users.
On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 12:47 PM, David Gerard
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> On 18 April 2013 20:43, David Gerard <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> > On 18 April 2013 17:50, Pau Giner <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
> >> Please let me know if you see any possible concern with
this approach.
>
> > My first thought is of how upset people were when the
first version of
> > Vector hid the language links by default. I would suggest
being sure
> > there will be little or no similar objection.
>
>
> (hit send too soon, sorry)
>
> A simple solution that would avoid a similar reaction is: do
not do
> this by default - make it only for logged-in users who want
it that
> way.
>
> Possibly for default users, you could put the
heuristically-calculated
> likely preferred languages at the top. But keeping the rest
of the
> list below, right there on display, will (I predict) be
favoured, as
> advertising the many languages of Wikipedia is a
strongly-held value
> of many Wikimedians.
>
>
> - d.
>
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