Accept-language is systematically broken for minority languages within dominant language communities. In New Zealand, a country with three official languages and a textbook case of language revivalism, I've never met anyone without a degree in computer science who sets accept-language, and I've never seen a computer system which ships with all three official languages selectable. Most computer systems ship with en or en-us as the default.
If there were silver bullets in this area, the solution would be obvious and we wouldn't even be thinking about having this conversation.
cheers stuart
On Thursday, May 7, 2015, Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org wrote:
As I've now said...4 times, I don't think we'd be using geolocation. We'd be using the accept-language header. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_header_fields#Accept-Language
On 7 May 2015 at 00:52, WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com wrote:
When a reader comes to Wikipedia from the web we can detect their IP
address and that usually geolocates them to a country. More often than not that then tells you the dominant language of that country.
If we were to default to official or dominant languages then I predict
endless arguments as to which language(s) should be the default in which countries. The large expat community in some parts of the Arab world might prefer English over Arabic. India would want to do things by state, and a whole new front would emerge in the Israeli Palestine debate.
Regards
Jonathan Cardy
On 7 May 2015, at 05:06, Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com wrote:
hey guys, you can't guess geolocation, because occasionally you'd be wrong. this happens to me all the time. I want to read a site in spanish... and then it thinks I'm in Latin America, when I'm not.
--Sam
On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 10:07 PM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org
wrote:
Possibly. But that sounds potentially wooly and sometimes inaccurate.
When a browser makes a web request, it sends a header called the accept_language header (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_header_fields#Accept-Language)
which indicates what languages the browser finds ideal - i.e., what languages the user and system are using.
If we're going to make modifications here (I hope we will. But again; early days) I don't see a good argument for using geolocation, which is, as you've noted, flawed without substantial time and energy being applied to map those countries to "probable" languages. The data the browser already sends to the server contains the /certain/ languages. We can just use that.
On 6 May 2015 at 22:50, Stuart A. Yeates syeates@gmail.com wrote: This seems like a great place to use analytics data, for each division in the geo-location classification, rank each of the languages by usage and present the top N as likely candidates (+ browser settings) when we need the user to pick a language.
cheers stuart -- ...let us be heard from red core to black sky
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 2:24 PM, Mark J. Nelson mjn@anadrome.org
wrote:
Stuart A. Yeates syeates@gmail.com writes:
> Reading that excellent presentation, the thought that struck me was: > > "If I wanted to subvert the assumption that Wikipedia == en.wiki, > linking to http://www.wikipedia.org/ is what I'd do." > > A smarter http://www.wikipedia.org/ might guess geo-location and
thus
> local languages.
I'd also like to see something smarter done at the main page, but the "and thus" bit here is notoriously tricky.
For example most geolocation-based things, like Wikidata by default, tend to produce funny results in Denmark. A Copenhagener is offered something like this choice, in order:
- Danish, Greelandic, Faroese, Swedish, German, ...
The reasoning here is that Danish, Greenlandic, and Faroese are
official
languages of the Danish Realm, which includes both Denmark proper,
and
two autonomous territories, Greeland and the Faroe Islands. And then Sweden and Germany are the two neighboring countries.
But for the average Copenhagener, the following order is far more likely:
- Danish, English, Norwegian Bokmål, ...
The reason here is that Norwegian Bokmål is very close to Danish in written form (more than Swedish is, and especially more than Faroese
is)
while English is a widely used semi-official language in business, government, and education (for example about half of university
theses
are now written in English, and several major companies use it as
their
official workplace language).
I think it's possible to come up with something that better aligns
with
readers' actual preferences, but it's not easy!
-Mark
-- Mark J. Nelson Anadrome Research http://www.kmjn.org
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