As multilingual content grows, interlanguage links become longer on Wikipedia articles. Articles such as "Barak Obama" or "Sun" have more than 200 links, and that becomes a problem for users that often switch among several languages.

As part of the future plans for the Universal Language Selector, we were considering to:

Show only a short list of the relevant languages for the user based on geo-IP, previous choices and browser settings of the current user. The language the users are looking for will be there most of the times.
Include a "more" option to access the rest of the languages for which the content exists with an indicator of the number of languages.
Provide a list of the rest of the languages that users can easily scan (grouped by script and region ao that alphabetical ordering is possible), and search (allowing users to search a language name in another language, using ISO codes or even making typos).

I have created a prototype to illustrate the idea. Since this is not connected to the MediaWiki backend, it lacks the advanced capabilities commented above but you can get the idea.

If you are interested in the missing parts, you can check the flexible search and the list of likely languages ("common languages" section) on the language selector used at http://translatewiki.net/ which is connected to MediaWiki backend.

As part of the testing process for the ULS language settings, I included a task to test also the compact interlanguage designs. Users seem to understand their use (view recording), but I wanted to get some feedback for changes affecting such an important element.

Please let me know if you see any possible concern with this approach.

Thanks

Pau Giner

Interaction Designer

Wikimedia Foundation