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