(But note that this does change the whole UI language, not just the data.)

(And for context, I’m pretty sure the reason we don’t respect Accept-Language for anonymous users is that it would hurt caching.)

On 25.01.19 11:55, Leszek Manicki wrote:

Hello Darren,

Using uselang parameter in the URL should do the trick, if I get what you're up to correctly. e.g. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q666?uselang=ja

Best! Leszek

On Fri, 25 Jan 2019 at 11:45, Darren Cook <darren@dcook.org mailto:darren@dcook.org> wrote:

I wanted to send someone a URL to show them how a data item looks in
Japanese (so we could see which items have a translation). But am I
right in thinking there is nothing I can put in the URL to do this?

I also tried changing my accept-language header to put "ja" first, but
it is ignored. Was this a feature that was discussed and rejected; or
just an itch that no-one has got around to scratching yet?

Darren

P.S. I realize I can login, change my UI to another language, and see
the data that way. But that is quite a long-winded process, especially
if the person has not created an account yet.

It also changes the whole UI, not just the data, which is painful if I
just want to see what has been translated but cannot read the
language.
I think for a project about data, you should be able to set the UI
language and the content language separately.

E.g. I just put a page into Greek (I think), and now I can see the few
items that have been translated, but cannot read the property
names! Let
alone navigate the site.) (The switch back to previous language
link at
the top was a great idea, though - thank-you to whoever thought of
that
shortcut.)


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Thanks Leszek; ?uselang=xx is basically what I was looking for, and works equally well when logged-in, which is helpful. (It doesn't work through links, but that is not a show-stopper.)

The reason this is not trivial is two-fold: 1) caching and b) the semantics of URLs. Serving different content from the same URL is generally a bad thing.

Agreed. (But I prefer the heading to the way Google used to do it for years, which was decide the UI language based on your IP address, and ignore the headers - perhaps that was caching-related, too.)

A soltuion for this is dicussed in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T114662, but work on this is currently not resourced.

Thanks.

Darren

...

Serving different content from the same URL is generally a bad thing.

No, it’s not. That’s the reason they invented Language-headers in the first place: So you can view a page in your language and I can view a site in my language. Please respect that not everybody can read english

I think the context was that language headers are one way to solve that problem, but with hindsight they are inferior to the solution of the language being in the URL.

Caching is a very important practical reason. Just as important, for me at least, is that if the preferred language is part of the URL I can forward a URL to someone and be sure we are looking at the same content.

Generic pages that use the accept-language preferences to redirect to the correct page are one possible way to please everyone. E.g. wikidata.org could redirect to en.wikidata.org or de.wikidata.org or ja.wikidata.org. But those redirects create extra load/bandwidth, and it might be too late for it now (i.e. if millions of wikidata.org URLs are out there in the wild).

Darren