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.
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