Stuart A. Yeates <syeates(a)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