On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 8:50 PM, Gregory Maxwell
<gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Who cares if people click them a lot? The space
they formally
occupied is filled with nothing now.
They were equally valuable as a marketing statement about the breadth
and inclusiveness of our project as they were as a navigational tool.
Concealing them behind the languages box also significantly reduces
discoverability for the people who need it most: Someone who, through
following links, ends up on a wikipedia which is not in their primary
language. Before they needed to scroll down past a wall of difficult
to read foreign language, now they need to do that and expand some
foreign language box.
I agree with every one of these points, and want to emphasize the
last—a person may be able to recognize the word for his language in
another random language, but he probably won't recognize the word for
"language" itself.