On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 9:19 AM, Nicholas Michael Bashour nicholasbashour@gmail.com wrote:
Is there a way to make the names of languages appear in the language of the wiki on which they are displayed? For example, the language links now are in whatever that language is called in that specific language, but in the future, would it be possible, say, on the English Wikipedia to have all language links say the name of the language in English, and on the Hungarian page they would all be in Hungarian, etc?
I'm not sure what the answer to your question is, but note that it would be better to have this controlled by the user language, not the content language. So if I'm on the Hungarian Wikipedia, but my interface is language is set to English, they should display in English. Since the default interface language would match the content language, anonymous users and those who haven't changed their settings would still see it in Hungarian.
However, I'm not sure if using the exonyms by default ("translated" language name) is better than the endonyms (what the language is called in its own language). Imagine you somehow got linked to the Japanese article for what you're looking for, but you only speak English -- would you know which language on the long interwiki list is English? Like what Gerard said, would you know if you wanted to click on 英語, フランス語, スペイン語, or 中国語?
Preferences are evil, but this is probably something we'd want to make a user-controlled option with the default display being the endonym.
-- Casey Brown (Cbrown1023) caseybrown.org