I don't see any special handling for variants in the old PhoneGap app... It's possible that the web browser engine's XMLHTTPRequest included an Accept-Language header by default and our native HTTP requests aren't, in which case the old app might have 'magically worked' because the server side would pick the right variant for output, *if* your phone was configured in one of the Chinese locales.

We might be able to do a quick-fix by manually passing the locale identifier in an Accept-Language header; I'll do a quick test and see if it affects the data we get back.

Proper fix would still need to be able to select a variant even if Chinese is not your phone's configured language; I tend to agree that adding multiple entries in the main language list would be the simplest thing.

-- brion


On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 4:09 PM, Bernd Sitzmann <bsitzmann@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Totally agree with Adam here. Great info, Brion! 

My initial inclination is to add more language entries to the languages list to allow for selecting the variant as well. Not sure where we would put the variant selector in the UI if we had a separate one.

I wonder how the old app handled this since based on the user reviews this sounds to be a regression.

Cheers,
Bernd


On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 9:49 AM, Adam Baso <abaso@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Brion, awesome response, thanks! Design crew, what do you say? This does seem to be one of the most highly reported issues on Google Play reviews.

-Adam




On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 5:28 PM, Brion Vibber <bvibber@wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Wednesday, July 2, 2014, Adam Baso <abaso@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I've made further updates to the Etherpad. Lots of good feedback.


Anyone have insight on the Chinese language thing? I was wondering if it has to do with the default soft keyboard being one thing but the display Wikipedia being a different variant.

So Chinese language is .... long story generally, but script-wise, you basically have two main variants:
* Traditional Chinese as used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and generally outside PRC
* Simplified Chinese as used in People's Republic of China

Simplified Chinese makes various modifications to characters to reduce the number of brush/penstrokes to deal with etc.

Typically, software translators just do separate versions for traditional and simplified, and the appropriate version is selected based on the locale and country.


Wikipedia/MediaWiki handles Chinese a little differently, by allowing use of both on input, and applying a conversion on output to one of Simplified or Traditional (or several slight variants) based on user selection or configured language. There are some markup features for overriding the default conversions between the script variants.

(This system is also used for some Eastern European and Central Asian languages that have, for instance, Cyrillic/Latin forms or Arabic/Latin forms. Most notable is Serbian, with Cyrillic and Latin.)

Currently in the app we don't handle the variants for page content -- you can only select the base Chinese language, and you end up reading the default which may or may not convert the way you want. (That's probably why you see both people asking for Traditional and people asking for Simplified...)

Basically we have to pass a 'variant=zh-hans' or 'variant=zh-hant' parameter with the API content request, based on some override.

Either we can separate out zh-hans and zh-hant intp two language entries, or we can add he concept of variant selection as a second switch, and initialize it by default based on the locale.

-- brion


 

-Adam


On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 7:08 AM, Adam Baso <abaso@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I added some updates from the non-English reviews.

I also tried to reply to some people with translated text mainly on crashes ("we're looking into crashes on specific devices, please do submit crash reports") and finding the languages menu ("sorry if it's causing problems, here are instructions for finding the language chooser").

-Adam


On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 12:10 AM, Vibha Bamba <vbamba@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi everyone,
I've started an etherpad to document relevant comments from the app store reviews in order to manage user feedback. 


Please paste comments directly without editorial in the relevant sections if you would like to help out. Synthesis/ Analysis to follow. 

Thanks!
Vibha

----
Vibha Bamba
Senior Designer | WMF Design







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