Hi, just wanted to give people a heads up about language-sensitive redirects on the m.wikipedia.org/ (and zero.wikipedia.org/) webroot:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero/Accept-Language_Aware_Redirect...
Dan Foy, Maryana, and I spoke on this stuff, and we thought it would be best to see how this works in Wikipedia Zero land, and then if it works well, continue dialog for the mobile web Wikipedia webroot afterward for the non-Wikipedia Zero use case.
Usually we don't like to vary the cache on Accept-Language, but this is one place where we're exploring the concept. It's possible to try to figure out the language prefix in Varnish, but for now we're trying this as a pure MediaWiki thing.
-Adam
Adam Baso, 28/10/2014 21:26:
Hi, just wanted to give people a heads up about language-sensitive redirects on the m.wikipedia.org/ http://m.wikipedia.org/ (and zero.wikipedia.org/ http://zero.wikipedia.org/) webroot:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero/Accept-Language_Aware_Redirect...
Dan Foy, Maryana, and I spoke on this stuff, and we thought it would be best to see how this works in Wikipedia Zero land, and then if it works well, continue dialog for the mobile web Wikipedia webroot afterward for the non-Wikipedia Zero use case.
Usually we don't like to vary the cache on Accept-Language, but this is one place where we're exploring the concept. It's possible to try to figure out the language prefix in Varnish, but for now we're trying this as a pure MediaWiki thing.
Cc mediawiki-i18n. As for MediaWiki, this is UniversalLanguageSelector domain; outside MediaWiki, do note the project portals (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Project_portals) sorely need to be made language-aware at some point, and probably have several orders of magnitudes more visitors than the "mdot webroots".
Nemo
Alright, we're close to issuing this code in production for the Wikipedia Zero end user use case.
Federico, you're right - www.wikipedia.org/ gets a lot more traffic than m.wikipedia.org/; www.wikipedia.org/ skews more toward English, for several reasons, but it still seems like wiring up a JavaScript widget to talk to an API that examines the Accept-Languages, or something like that, might be useful for multilingual users and users not reading a language listed toward the top of the page. I'm currently pretty busy, but we could maybe at least ask Mxn (if not on this list) what Mxn thinks, as Mxn has been pretty involved with the global Wikipedia portal template. Should I BCC Mxn on this thread, or email Mxn off-thread? Mxn tries to avoid spam from what I can tell on Mxn's personal website.
-Adam
On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 2:28 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Adam Baso, 28/10/2014 21:26:
Hi, just wanted to give people a heads up about language-sensitive redirects on the m.wikipedia.org/ http://m.wikipedia.org/ (and zero.wikipedia.org/ http://zero.wikipedia.org/) webroot:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero/Accept- Language_Aware_Redirects
Dan Foy, Maryana, and I spoke on this stuff, and we thought it would be best to see how this works in Wikipedia Zero land, and then if it works well, continue dialog for the mobile web Wikipedia webroot afterward for the non-Wikipedia Zero use case.
Usually we don't like to vary the cache on Accept-Language, but this is one place where we're exploring the concept. It's possible to try to figure out the language prefix in Varnish, but for now we're trying this as a pure MediaWiki thing.
Cc mediawiki-i18n. As for MediaWiki, this is UniversalLanguageSelector domain; outside MediaWiki, do note the project portals (< https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Project_portals%3E) sorely need to be made language-aware at some point, and probably have several orders of magnitudes more visitors than the "mdot webroots".
Nemo
On 2014-11-25 13:27, Adam Baso wrote:
Federico, you're right - www.wikipedia.org/ http://www.wikipedia.org/ gets a lot more traffic than m.wikipedia.org/ http://m.wikipedia.org/; www.wikipedia.org/ http://www.wikipedia.org/ skews more toward English, for several reasons, but it still seems like wiring up a JavaScript widget to talk to an API that examines the Accept-Languages, or something like that, might be useful for multilingual users and users not reading a language listed toward the top of the page. I'm currently pretty busy, but we could maybe at least ask Mxn (if not on this list) what Mxn thinks, as Mxn has been pretty involved with the global Wikipedia portal template.
The portals currently use navigator.languages/.language/.userLanguage to have the search box default to the first Accept-Language language. I would certainly be open to having the portal react more noticeably to this value, for instance by dynamically placing it in the top 10 ring, displacing one of the larger wikis. Any change in behavior is going to need approval from the Meta community at least, but that shouldn't stop us from trying.
If OTOH the suggestion is to immediately redirect to the indicated language edition, I'd want to see statistics on the percentage of Wikipedia visitors whose Accept-Language or UI language actually matches their home wiki. I suspect that many just leave it set to their operating system language, which doesn't necessarily match their favorite wiki. It's one thing for mdot to redirect, because mobile users would be less interested in a landing page with tiny links. But if the main portal redirects, we'll quickly get flak for being too [insert language]-centric.
Should I BCC Mxn on this thread, or email Mxn off-thread? Mxn tries to avoid spam from what I can tell on Mxn's personal website.
My resistance has been futile so far. :-\
Minh, thanks for the awesome feedback! Response inline.
On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 5:23 PM, Minh Nguyen mxn@1ec5.org wrote:
On 2014-11-25 13:27, Adam Baso wrote:
Federico, you're right - www.wikipedia.org/ http://www.wikipedia.org/ gets a lot more traffic than m.wikipedia.org/ http://m.wikipedia.org/; www.wikipedia.org/ http://www.wikipedia.org/ skews more toward English, for several reasons, but it still seems like wiring up a JavaScript widget to talk to an API that examines the Accept-Languages, or something like that, might be useful for multilingual users and users not reading a language listed toward the top of the page. I'm currently pretty busy, but we could maybe at least ask Mxn (if not on this list) what Mxn thinks, as Mxn has been pretty involved with the global Wikipedia portal template.
The portals currently use navigator.languages/.language/.userLanguage to have the search box default to the first Accept-Language language. I would certainly be open to having the portal react more noticeably to this value, for instance by dynamically placing it in the top 10 ring, displacing one of the larger wikis. Any change in behavior is going to need approval from the Meta community at least, but that shouldn't stop us from trying.
Yeah, I really like that feature on the search box.
I also like your idea about dynamically updating a lang in the top 10 ring. If a dynamic update to the ring isn't okay, I wonder if people would be okay with shimming in the .language/.userLanguage-mapped language (.languages-mapped languages) between the top 10 langs and the search box, for any language not already in the top 10?
If OTOH the suggestion is to immediately redirect to the indicated language edition, I'd want to see statistics on the percentage of Wikipedia visitors whose Accept-Language or UI language actually matches their home wiki. I suspect that many just leave it set to their operating system language, which doesn't necessarily match their favorite wiki. It's one thing for mdot to redirect, because mobile users would be less interested in a landing page with tiny links. But if the main portal redirects, we'll quickly get flak for being too [insert language]-centric.
Agreed. The suggestion isn't immediate redirect on www.wikipedia.org.
Should I BCC Mxn on this thread, or email Mxn
off-thread? Mxn tries to avoid spam from what I can tell on Mxn's personal website.
My resistance has been futile so far. :-\
Me too :)