Also, did you think of the accessibility issues in
your solution? Here I
especialy think of people with view disabilities, for who js often mean
no way to get the content, while a long list of hyperlinks is
manageable.
Le vendredi 19 avril 2013 à 20:19 +0200, Pau Giner a écrit :
Thanks for all the feedback!
I'll try to respond below to some of the issues raised:
Which is the problem?
As it has been mentioned, one of the most effective ways of hiding
something is to surround it in the middle of a long list. This
produces two problems:
* Lack of discoverability. users may be not aware that the
content is available in their language (which goes against our
goal of providing access to knowledge). Speakers of small
languages that access the English Wikipedia because it has
more content, are forced to make an effort each time to check
if each article is also available in their language.
* Problems for multi-lingual exploration. It is hard to switch
between multiple language versions since the users has to look
for his languages each time in the whole list.
The fact that some Wikipedias adjust the order of the languages, the
existence of user scripts and an Opera extension to solve the issue,
is an indicator of the existence of such problem.
We support lots of languages (+300) but users are normally interested
in a small (1-8) subset of those. We need to make these subset easily
discoverable for our users, and providing them in the middle of a list
with 200 items is not the best way to do it in my opinion.
Possible cultural and value problems
As it was commented, the multilingual nature of Wikipedia is a strong
held value. However, currently it is hard to know in how many
languages an article is available since you need to count the links.
With the proposed approach we provide a number which helps to
communicate that. So I think we are not going against that value.
I think that concerns about the imposition of languages per region are
not a big issue when the previous user choices and the browser accept
language are considered with more priority than Geo-IP. Users just
need to select their language once and it will be appearing in the
short list the next times. These concerns should be more relevant with
the current situation where some Wikis put some languages on top
regardless user choices (for some work 100% of the time, for others
they fail 100% of the time).
I also don't think that we should prioritise the need to hide
"languages that users somehow dislikes" over making it easy to access
the languages that the user wants. In any case, the former is also not
supported with the current approach.
Why to hide?
I understand the problems commented when language links were initially
hidden in Vector, since uses were required to make an additional step
to get into the same long list of links we currently have. With the
proposed approach, the extra step is only taken in exceptional cases
(e.g., a user in a foreign country accessing from a public pc), and
this is made only once (not for each language change), and aids such
as search are provided to make it really quick.
The reordering alternative has some problems compared with the
proposed approach. For example, when a language does not appear on
top, it is hard to determine whether the current article is not
provided in that language or it is in the middle of the list. In
addition, with reordering, you cannot rely on alphabetical order
(while you can present the short list alphabetically).
Considering size and quality of the article
It can be a factor to consider since communicating that an article has
good versions in other languages is a good thing. But I think it is a
low priority one, since I find hard to imagine a user selecting a
language which she does not understand (otherwise will be already in
the short list) just because the article is of good quality. In any
case, users normally speak 1-8 languages, so even in a relatively
short list there is still room for other criteria.
The way to access more
We choose the "..." so that the label could work across languages. So
that you can go back to your language if you arrive by accident to a
foreign Wikipedia (or you are an advanced user curious to check if web
fonts were enabled in Javanese wikipedia). However, the visual
execution needs some work still to make it more touch friendly among
other things.
Details on the language list UI
The interactive prototype was created to communicate the main idea and
most details are still lacking.
Thanks for pointing layout and navigation problems. The layout of the
list is one of the aspects that needs more work: currently we group
the languages by script to help the user to recognise their familiar
scripts, and the algorithm also makes some control of orphan/widow
items. That works well for very long lists of languages, but needs
further tuning when the number of elements is reduced. An algorithm
that presents the list optimally for all possible lengths is something
to be done.
Pau
--
Pau Giner
Interaction Designer
Wikimedia Foundation
On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 6:50 PM, Pau Giner <pginer(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
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
--
Pau Giner
Interaction Designer
Wikimedia Foundation
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