On mobile devices, many people go directly to wikipedia.org. Unfortunately, this shows the standard portal page of the globe and languages. Everyone in the world currently sees the same page on their mobile device, and it is not so easy to read and navigate that page on a small screen.
What if we could show a country-specific portal page automatically, based on the current location of the user? The search interface would use the most-used language of that country, with secondary languages for that country prominently displayed as options.
In order to see how countries use languages, take a look here:
In some countries, the native language is the primary version of Wikipedia that is used. Certainly that is true of all English-speaking countries, Germany, France, Spain, Japan, etc. But there are more than 60 countries where English is not their native language, and yet English Wikipedia is the primary version. Usually the secondary version is the one in their native language.
And in India, English may be the common denominator, but all the Indic languages would be obvious choices. Easily searching in one of those languages could be so much more obvious. Viewing and typing in some languages can be an issue, of course.
What do you think of this idea? Give us your feedback so we can prioritize this project.
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As a reminder, the home page of other Wikimedia sites will be converted quite soon to the mobile view, meaning users by default will see the Mobile Frontend version of the site from mobile devices. User can switch to the desktop view at the bottom of the page. If the home page has not been formatted, only the search bar will appear in the mobile view. Again, for instructions on how to format the home page, see:
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