On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:13 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote: They were equally valuable as a marketing statement about the breadth and inclusiveness of our project as they were as a navigational tool. Concealing them behind the languages box also significantly reduces discoverability for the people who need it most: Someone who, through following links, ends up on a wikipedia which is not in their primary language. Before they needed to scroll down past a wall of difficult to read foreign language, now they need to do that and expand some foreign language box. In my opinion, the world is not best served by hyper-optimizing for the most frequent and shallow interests of the largest majorities.

2010/6/2 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> That's exactly my opinion, too. I am trying to back it with data. -- אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי Amir Elisha Aharoni http://aharoni.wordpress.com "We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: Interface clutter is not psychologically free.  Empty space is better than space filled with mostly-useless controls.  Whether these particular controls are worth it I don't know, but the general principle of hiding seldom-used things is sound.

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 5:51 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: They can't?  Why not?

When you enter your car and drive to your destination, you make hundreds of gestures but use only once the key, at the beginning.

A probable scenario: people reaching wikipedia on a foreign language click just once on the correct language, then may browse hundreds of articles without changing the language again.

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 6:30 PM, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote: . . . well, I can expand on this a bit.  Wikipedia's goals can be summarized as "Give people access to free knowledge".  This can be measured lots of different ways, of course.  But I see no reason why they shouldn't all scale more or less linearly in the number of people affected.  If we can get an extra piece of useful information to a billion people over the course of a year, why isn't that a billion times better on average than getting an extra piece of useful information to one person, for any definition of "useful"?  If it isn't exactly a billion times, why should we believe that it's less than a billion (as you seem to suggest) rather than more? Cost-benefit analyses involving death are the same.  People would like to claim that lives and money are incommensurable, say, but that's patently false.  No one would advocate spending a trillion dollars to save one person's life -- if nothing else, you could save many people's lives for the same amount.  Even if your only goal is to save lives in the short term, a life is worth *at most* X dollars, because you can straightforwardly exchange dollars for lives saved.  In practice, X is probably less than 1,000 if you spend it right. When you deal with everyday situations, then saying "lives and money are incommensurable" is a good enough approximation.  It doesn't work if you have lots of lives, or lots of money, or ways to exchange lives and money that don't come up in everyday situations. On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 6:28 PM, Noein <pronoein(a)gmail.com> wrote: And it would be a mistake to omit the keyhole altogether, or to make it hard to find if you look.  But there's no need to make it as obtrusive and easy to reach as the steering wheel or the pedals. Indeed, you shouldn't, because that would take away attention and space from things that are more often used. Is this probable?  What are people's reasons for using interlanguage links?  How many people miss them now that they're collapsed -- among the readership as a whole, not the extremely vocal and committed editors who read foundation-l and will find them easily anyway? _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

wrote:

In the absence of further data, the only real argument I saw for restoring the interlanguage links by default is to show how international Wikipedia is and raise awareness about how many other languages are supported. In this case they aren't actually meant to be clicked on, so a low click rate isn't a problem. They're more of an advertisement. This is a fairly reasonable argument -- the huge size of the language list is a plus, not a minus, from this perspective. I don't know if it outweighs concerns about clutter, though. Maybe.

Users don't explicitly complain about small things.

They especially don't complain about things like clutter, because the negative effect that has is barely perceptible -- extra effort required to find things.

But if you take away a feature that's important to a small number of users, or that's well established and people are used to it, you'll get lots of complaints from a tiny minority of users.

At the English Wikipedia, this is not so.  If we had a bike shed, there would be daily complaints about its color.

I've encountered many complaints about clutter at the English Wikipedia (pertaining to articles, our main page and other pages), but not one complaint that the interwiki links caused clutter.

However, assuming that the interwiki links benefit a relatively small percentage of users (still a non-negligible number in absolute terms), I've yet to see evidence that displaying them by default is problematic.  Like David Gerard, I desire access to the data behind this decision.

Said data indicated only that the interwiki links were used relatively infrequently.  Apparently, there is absolutely no data suggesting that the full list's display posed a problem.  Rather, this is a hunch based upon the application of a general design principle whose relevance has not been established. Aryeh Gregor: You cited the importance of data (and the systematic analysis thereof).  In light of this explanation, what is your opinion now?

Aryeh, I was under the (apparently mistaken?) impression that at Wikipedia, the community makes the decisions, something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mexico.Chis.EZLN.01.jpg I have seen a chorus of voices against this change, many have presented good, coherent arguments (despite your claim to the contrary). The community has spoken and continues speaking. m. ___________________

Because evidence is a great thing, but judgment is necessary too. It would be nice if you could do everything strictly based on evidence, but real life isn't so simple.

Just because there are complaints about *many* problems, doesn't mean there are complaints about *all* problems. Some problems draw few to no complaints, by their nature.

If every problem really did trigger complaints, we wouldn't need usability studies -- we could find all problems by just looking at complaints. This isn't the case.

There is ample evidence that when users are presented with more buttons to click, they take longer to find what they want and make more mistakes.

We can apply this generality to specific cases without having to directly check it every time.

We don't have the budget to run a usability study on every individual possible problem.

From: Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2 To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Date: Sunday, 6 June, 2010, 16:40 On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 4:21 PM, David Levy <lifeisunfair(a)gmail.com> wrote: a bike shed, I should say that *almost no* users complain about small things.  A tiny group of committed users will complain about small things, but they're not the targets of the Usability Initiative, so their complaints are not relevant here, *except* insofar as they provide reasoning or evidence about what most users think.  By contrast, complaints from occasional users are useful in usability discussions even if the users provide no reasoning, because the complaints are ipso facto evidence of a problem.  (But if we have only anecdotal evidence of complaints from occasional users, of course, that needs to be treated with the same caution as any anecdotal evidence.) English other pages), but clutter. My first guess would be that people didn't complain about interwiki links' clutter because they've always been there.  By the time you're comfortable enough with the site to complain, you just won't notice them.  I'd guess that the complaints you see are when things *change*. Experienced users are prone to complain when things change, because they've gotten used to how things are.  If we leave off the links for a year, then turn them back on, I predict we'd get complaints about clutter. relatively small absolute terms), default is the data behind Then say exactly what evidence you desire.  What test would you suggest to see whether hiding the links helped or harmed things? On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 1:30 AM, David Levy <lifeisunfair(a)gmail.com> wrote: used relatively data suggesting that this is a hunch principle whose the systematic what is your opinion Data is important.  It's also not always possible to gather.  When multiple things are competing for attention, you can make one or the other more prominent, and it will get correspondingly more clicks. But it's up to your judgment to assess whether that's a good thing or a bad thing: are more people finding what they actually want, or are people being distracted from what they actually want?  If we have more clicks on interlanguage links and less on other interface elements, is that good or bad?  If we wanted to maximize clicks on interlanguage links, we could always put them above the article text, so you have to scroll through them to get to the article text . . . but that's obviously ridiculous. As Greg said above, data is important, but it can be hard to apply correctly.  Sometimes you really have to use judgment.  But we could still use more data -- for instance, why do people usually click interlanguage links?  Do they usually understand the language they're reading the article in, or not?  We could have a little multiple-choice question that pops up a small percentage of the time when people click on an interlanguage link. My suspicion is that a long list is not ideal.  Yes, people will see it for what it is and they'll be able to find their language easily enough if they look.  But it's distracting, and it's not obvious without (in some cases) a lot of scrolling whether there's anything below it.  If we could use some heuristic to pick a few languages to display, with a prominent "More" link at the bottom, I suspect that would be superior. But first we should gather data on click rates for the list fully expanded and unexpanded.  Per-page click rates are important here -- many articles have no interlanguage links, so will obviously pull down the average click rate despite being unaffected by the change.  What's the trend like as articles have more interlanguage links?  How many more interlanguage clicks are there for articles in twenty languages as opposed to five?  Can we plot that?  For each wiki separately, for preference? All this data gathering takes manpower to do, of course.  Maybe the usability team doesn't have the manpower.  If so, does anyone qualified volunteer?  If not, we have to make decisions without data -- and that doesn't automatically mean "keep the status quo", nor "change it back if people complain loudly".  It means someone who happens to be in charge of making the decision needs to make a judgment call, based on all the evidence they have available. (By the way, I'm not an employee of Wikimedia and am sometimes not at all happy with how the usability team operates.  I happen to think that they have a good point in this case, though, irrespective of how they made or enforced the decision.) _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

MZMcBride wrote: Shimgray was kind enough to make a graphical representation of this data.[1] MZMcBride [1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enwp-interwiki-201006.svg

I should say that *almost no* users complain about small things.  A tiny group of committed users will complain about small things, but they're not the targets of the Usability Initiative, so their complaints are not relevant here, *except* insofar as they provide reasoning or evidence about what most users think.

By contrast, complaints from occasional users are useful in usability discussions even if the users provide no reasoning, because the complaints are ipso facto evidence of a problem. (But if we have only anecdotal evidence of complaints from occasional users, of course, that needs to be treated with the same caution as any anecdotal evidence.)

My first guess would be that people didn't complain about interwiki links' clutter because they've always been there.

 By the time you're comfortable enough with the site to complain, you just won't notice them.

I'd guess that the complaints you see are when things *change*.

Experienced users are prone to complain when things change, because they've gotten used to how things are.

If we leave off the links for a year, then turn them back on, I predict we'd get complaints about clutter.

Then say exactly what evidence you desire.  What test would you suggest to see whether hiding the links helped or harmed things?

Data is important.  It's also not always possible to gather.

When multiple things are competing for attention, you can make one or the other more prominent, and it will get correspondingly more clicks. But it's up to your judgment to assess whether that's a good thing or a bad thing: are more people finding what they actually want, or are people being distracted from what they actually want? If we have more clicks on interlanguage links and less on other interface elements, is that good or bad?

If we wanted to maximize clicks on interlanguage links, we could always put them above the article text, so you have to scroll through them to get to the article text . . . but that's obviously ridiculous.

My suspicion is that a long list is not ideal.

Now, mind you, I don't necessary support getting rid of the interlanguage links. I'm mostly objecting to the reasoning being brought forward for that point, which seems to be mostly: * Some unknown number of users might somehow end up at a wiki they don't understand and not be able to find the wiki they really want. Maybe. Except we have no data to suggest that this happens with non-negligible frequency. The evidence apparently indicates that few people use the interlanguage links. * Lots of people have complained, therefore it must be a bad change. * Interface clutter isn't important anyway. The last two arguments are completely wrongheaded. The first might or might not have merit -- but no one has even attempted to propose what evidence we could gather to check it (I think). Most of the people making the first argument seem to assume without question that there *must* be a lot of people using the interlanguage links for this, or at least a significant number. This is not the way to conduct an informed discussion.

In the absence of further data, the only real argument I saw for restoring the interlanguage links by default is to show how international Wikipedia is and raise awareness about how many other languages are supported. In this case they aren't actually meant to be clicked on, so a low click rate isn't a problem. They're more of an advertisement. This is a fairly reasonable argument -- the huge size of the language list is a plus, not a minus, from this perspective. I don't know if it outweighs concerns about clutter, though. Maybe.

Sort of tangentially, ... am I really the only one that frequently uses the Wikipedia inter-language links as a big translating dictionary?

First, some background on the problem we're addressing and the design principle that we used.  Every situation is unique, but in the case of the interwikilinks, we believe the sheer number of language links, especially within the context of an information-heavy page, makes users "numb" to the list.  When people see large collections of things, they tend to group them all together as one object and not identify the individual parts that make the whole.

 While we did not explicitly test for this during our usability studies (e.g., it wasn't included as a major design question), we did exercise judgement in identifying this as a problem, based partly on the applying the above design principle to the site, partly on the data.

Thank you for your input.

Hi all, thank you for your summary, Guillaume. I would like to add to this a question based on Jon's insightful email: the research you did on clicks etc, was apparently only on the English Wikipedia. Would it be an option to first do more research on how the links are used on the other projects? Out of the >700 projects to choose from, you unfortunately picked one where the clicking is most likely to be very different from all the other projects. Usually that is not a good basis to build decisions for all 700 projects on. Besides that, it seems you measured logged in users (since you mention comparing monobook vs vector, it seems that you measured people who switched before the Big Switch?) Perhaps you want to actually do research on how anonymous users work. There's a few other things that would be interesting:

Or you could simply restore the one-line code modification that provided the default behavior requested by the community (pending evidence that an alternative setup is beneficial).

Howie Fung wrote: Said data indicated only that the interwiki links were used relatively infrequently.  Apparently, there is absolutely no data suggesting that the full list's display posed a problem.  Rather, this is a hunch based upon the application of a general design principle whose relevance has not been established.

Austin Hair wrote: Your last sentence surprised me, as I haven't seen anyone opine that the usability team is stupid (and I certainly am not suggesting anything of the sort).  Everyone makes mistakes, and we believe that one has been made in this instance.  As for a practical fix, one actually was implemented (and quickly undone).

Austin, think about who "everyone" is.  The folks here on foundation-l are not representative of readers.  The job of the user experience team is to try to balance all readers' needs, which is not easy, and will sometimes involve making decisions that not everyone agrees with. People here have given some useful input, but I think it's far from obvious that the user experience team has made a "mistake.". (I'm not really intending to weigh in on this particular issue -- I'm speaking generally.)

On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 3:03 AM,  <susanpgardner(a)gmail.com> wrote: Sue, not personal, but I think here I say, joining to the choir which Jon and Eia began: while English Wikipedia is the most visited websites of the Wikimedia, it is only 50% and most of its readers are English Speaking. They have no good reasons I believe to representative the rest of us non-English speaking people who are 2/60 of this planet. What is the good reason usability team thought data from English Wikipedia visitors' behaviors and alone were enough to design for all other 200+ languages' readership? It looks me an obvious mistake in opposition of your statement.  which is not easy, and will sometimes involve making decisions that not everyone agrees with. People here have given some useful input, but I think it's far from obvious that the user experience team has made a "mistake.". (I'm not really intending to weigh in on this particular issue -- I'm speaking generally.) -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD

From: David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a BadIdea, part 2 To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Date: Saturday, 5 June, 2010, 19:47 On 5 June 2010 19:40, Aphaia <aphaia(a)gmail.com> wrote: from English design for all obvious mistake in Indeed. There appears to be *no* community or reader groundswell in favour of hiding the interwiki links by default. Where are the fans? So far I see Aryeh in favour. Is there anyone else? On foundation-l or the blog? If this is such a good idea, where are the voices in favour, outside the Foundation staff? For a decision that directly contradicts the words of the mission statement, by hampering the process of people finding knowlege in their own language, this really does not appear good enough. Where is the communtiy or reader groundswell *in favour* of this move? It appears nonexistent. - d. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Sorry for top-posting. Austin, think about who "everyone" is.  The folks here on foundation-l are not representative of readers.  The job of the user experience team is to try to balance all readers' needs,

Aryeh Gregor has said a couple of very smart things in this thread, particularly this bit I'll quote below: "Users don't explicitly complain about small things.  They especially don't complain about things like clutter, because the negative effect that has is barely perceptible -- extra effort required to find things.  But if you take away a feature that's important to a small number of users, or that's well established and people are used to it, you'll get lots of complaints from a tiny minority of users.  Basing development decisions on who complains the loudest is what results in software packed with tons of useless and confusing features and lousy UI.  Like most open-source software, including MediaWiki.  Good design requires systematic analysis, ignoring user complaints if the evidence indicates they're not representative." Thanks, Sue -----Original Message----- From: Austin Hair <adhair(a)gmail.com> Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2010 15:56:26 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad        Idea, part 2 On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 3:47 PM, David Levy <lifeisunfair(a)gmail.com> wrote: Sorry if that wasn't clear—I didn't mean to indict you or anyone else for doing that; all I meant was that although I, personally, could easily focus on mistakes the usability team made, the way forward is to simply fix it to everyone's satisfaction. Austin _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Sue Gardner wrote: Perhaps you misread the context.  Austin wrote the word "stupid" as a hypothetical example of nonconstructive commentary that should be avoided.  No one has hurled an insult.

> Imagine that someone cleaning your office took your important > paperwork and dumped it in a bin. You complain— "Hey we need that > stuff to be accessible!" and they retort "Thank you for your > _feedback_. We'll consider it during our future cleaning plans". > > We're not just providing feedback here. We're collectively making a > decision, as we've always done, thank you very much.

I am convinced that the unique organizational structure of our organization, in which the community has historically been given a very high level of authority in the decision-making process, is one of the key elements of our success.

Have we entered a new chapter in our history as a community in which we, the people who have helped build this project, no longer get to help make the important decisions by contributing our ideas and venting our frustrations?

The folks here on foundation-l are not representative of readers.

The job of the user experience team is to try to balance all readers' needs, which is not easy, and will sometimes involve making decisions that not everyone agrees with.

People here have given some useful input, but I think it's far from obvious that the user experience team has made a "mistake.".

I notice that Howie Fung avoided answering my question: What would it take for this decision to be reversed? Also, you may be able to answer the question of what would happen if a wiki showed community conensus to remove this. Would the foundation forcibly keep it in place?

Austin, think about who "everyone" is.  The folks here on foundation-l are not representative of readers.  The job of the user experience team is to try to balance all readers' needs, which is not easy, and will sometimes involve making decisions that not everyone agrees with. People here have given some useful input, but I think it's far from obvious that the user experience team has made a "mistake.". (I'm not really intending to weigh in on this particular issue -- I'm speaking generally.)

A tiny benefit to a hundred million people wouldn't justify making wikipedia very hard to use for a hundred thousand

On 2 Jun 2010, at 22:51, Gregory Maxwell wrote: Can you justify that the change has now made it very hard for users of those interlanguage links? Given that it's now one click away (click on 'languages' in the sidebar) the first time, and then it stays there afterwards (this menu does stay expanded after the first time it's opened, right?), I wouldn't have thought that would make it very hard. I would support it being expanded by default, though (even though I rarely use it myself) simply because it's a lot less intuitive to find the language links now, [snip]

. . . well, I can expand on this a bit. Wikipedia's goals can be summarized as "Give people access to free knowledge". This can be measured lots of different ways, of course. But I see no reason why they shouldn't all scale more or less linearly in the number of people affected.

Sort of tangentially, ... am I really the only one that frequently uses the Wikipedia inter-language links as a big translating dictionary?  I've found it to be much more useful than automatic translation engines for mathematical terms (both more comprehensive but also in that it makes it easy to find the translations for many related terms).  The hiding doesn't make this any harder for me, but it would make me a lot less likely to discover this useful feature.

From: J Alexandr Ledbury-Romanov <alexandrdmitriromanov(a)gmail.com> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2 To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Date: Friday, 4 June, 2010, 9:27

Me three for using the interwiki links as a way of finding the word or phrase I'm looking for in another language (along with Wiktionary). Not only do they assist me in finding translations of the words or phrases I am looking for, they also give me context and relevant material for languages I'm comfortable using. They are also particularly useful for languages where I am not at all comfortable (e.g. Modern Standard Arabic) where I get results with images of the subject that confirm that I have found the right noun I need. Sometimes I get false positives, but unlike with my various dictionaries which I now rarely use, I can usually figure out pretty quickly that I have not got the translation I need. I'd be interested to know what the default languages I would get based computer profiling. Geolocating would put in me in Morocco (official language Modern Standard Arabic, though French is commonly used), browser configuration would give French, and Wikimedia system user preferences are set in English, simply because I predominantly use the English Wikipedia and English Wikinews; I'm far too lazy to have to translate the Wikimedia terminology in my head when navigating in French, German or Russian. AD 2010/6/4 phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com> <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> one that frequently translating useful than automatic more comprehensive translations for many this any harder for me, but this useful feature. wrote about it), but I interwiki links wish someone would unexpected/atypical reference desk is a the middle of _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Given the availability of translations that are just a click away, not even a native English speaker has to fear that clicking on an interwiki link will produce an unintelligible page. There could even be value to a double list which gives the option of viewing the other language article in its original form or in its machine translation.

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: Interface clutter is not psychologically free. Empty space is better than space filled with mostly-useless controls. Whether these particular controls are worth it I don't know, but the general principle of hiding seldom-used things is sound. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 5:48 AM, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote: They are not "mostly-useless controls"; they are there because _building_ content _in every language_ is our mission. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Our_projects Missing interwikis are a valuable cue that a block is missing.

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: Interface clutter is not psychologically free.  Empty space is better than space filled with mostly-useless controls.  Whether these particular controls are worth it I don't know, but the general principle of hiding seldom-used things is sound.

Who cares if people click them a lot?  The space they formally occupied is filled with nothing now. They were equally valuable as a marketing statement about the breadth and inclusiveness of our project as they were as a navigational tool. Concealing them behind the languages box also significantly reduces discoverability for the people who need it most: Someone who, through following links, ends up on a wikipedia which is not in their primary language. Before they needed to scroll down past a wall of difficult to read foreign language, now they need to do that and expand some foreign language box.

Maybe we should support the "Language Icon" idea: http://languageicon.org/index-icon.php

I fixed it (it's a one-line change), but Trevor reverted it: > This goes against an intentional design >decision. To discuss that decision further and submit proposals to change this >design please contact Howie Fung <hfung at wikimedia.org> or visit >http://usability.wikimedia.org

Per Erik M.'s previous post, we're working on a compromise solution whereby we show a list based on user's most likely language(s), probably based on browser, and then a "see other languages" link which would expand to give all the other langauages.  We're also looking at changing the word "Languages" into something that's more descriptive of what the links actually do. I've created the following page for more discussion/proposals on the topic: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Opinion:_Language_Links Howie On 6/3/10 4:41 PM, David Goodman wrote: _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

While that is "impossible" (read: hard), a simple approximation is to display languages links for the 10 "largest" corresponding articles in other languages, and then show a "more.." when there are more than 10. Another option is for contributors to specify which other interwiki links should be always visible; e.g. we would always want the FA's in other languages to be shown. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Link_FA

Per Erik M.'s previous post, we're working on a compromise solution whereby we show a list based on user's most likely language(s), probably based on browser, and then a "see other languages" link which would expand to give all the other langauages. We're also looking at changing the word "Languages" into something that's more descriptive of what the links actually do. I've created the following page for more discussion/proposals on the topic: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Opinion:_Language_Links Howie On 6/3/10 4:41 PM, David Goodman wrote: change this _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: be can However, 'letting people choose' is only workable for regular, logged-in users. If we're talking about anonymous users, guessing is more or less our only option. It's not an easy task, but luckily we can choose to have 3 or 4 languages rather than just one, so there is some margin of error. Still - geolocation usually doesn't go beyond country level, and for some countries we already have quite a number of languages. Usually one or a few languages will be enough to give everyone something they can speak well, but if we show only those, regional languages would not be shown to anyone at all, and thus miss out on a good advertising location. -- André Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

When you are monolingual and are already on your native language Wikipedia there isn't really a lot of use in going to another language.

Can someone from the Foundation confirm whether any testing was done with people who would actually be affected by the decision to remove the language links - or only on people who wouldn't care? If only the latter, then the stated reason for removal would be in serious need of urgent review.

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:17 PM, David Gerard &lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I won't speak for the Foundation, but my understanding is that sampled click-rates were measured on the live site, so it would have been a representative sample of our visitors.

That's not good enough. First of all, people who don't speak a language won't recognize the text "see other languages", or even "languages". Could you pick the word "ენები" out of a page full of text in a foreign language and understand that clicking it would lead you to a link to the English version of an article?

The reason your proposal to use geolocation or browser language is not good enough is that would still result in reducing the visibility of many, many Wikipedias. I think there are many users who would prefer to read articles in Catalan whose default browser language is set to ES, and geolocation will probably not solve that problem either.

I think it is a mistake to hide ANY interwikis. "clutter" is not a huge sacrifice for people to make to vastly increase INTERNATIONAL usability.

Erik Moeller wrote: As a sports fan, to me it looks like the backboard of a basketball hoop. I actually rather liked "Hyperion Frobnosticating Endoswitch", but such a wonderful name deserves to find a more worthy home than the MediaWiki pending changes feature.

--- El jue 3-jun-10, phoebe ayers escribió: Can't we use a flag in a cookie to remember the choice of show/collapse the language list ? That is simple and elegant (like me!) MarianoC.-

Last night I was discussing this with Finne (henna), and she proposed that we might show a default list based on the user's most likely language(s), while still keeping the others collapsed by default. This could be done using the HTTP accept-language header—which would, at the very least, show you your native language.  (And perhaps, if someone's feeling adventurous, augment that using a GeoIP system. There are lots of possibilities.)

Yes, we discussed this internally as well as a better path to exposse Wikipedia's multilingual nature than to dump a long list of native language names in the sidebar (we might have an expansion link such as "Show X other languages" to indicate the large number of language versions available).

Hoi, This would be a good idea only when you are allowed to choose the languages you do want to see. Thanks, GerardM