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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-- Oliver Keyes Research Analyst Wikimedia Foundation
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