All,
My mistake. The pages in Google's index that I used for sampling - the ones that have "Sorry, ..." in their description in Google search results - are cached pages. I assumed incorrectly that those pages were based on recent indexing (e.g., in the past few days).
I think we can actually stick to the original plan of Google re-indexing and the search results de-emphasizing the <language>.
zero.wikipedia.org links within the next 30 days.
I still find it strange that there are <language>.
zero.wikipedia.org links that turned up higher in the search engine rankings than their better-established <language>.
wikipedia.org counterparts. But I suppose with fewer competing page elements, especially on long-tail articles with fewer or no direct links to the desktop page, this is maybe not totally unexpected.
-Adam