On 4 June 2010 21:21, David Levy <lifeisunfair(a)gmail.com> wrote:
They
especially don't complain about things like clutter, because the
negative effect that has is barely perceptible -- extra effort
required to find things.
I've encountered many complaints about clutter at the English
Wikipedia (pertaining to articles, our main page and other pages), but
not one complaint that the interwiki links caused clutter.
FWIW, the only time I've heard a complaint about the visual effect of
the interwikis is where we have a very short article on an
internationally popular topic, such as:
http://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaa
...here, 90% of the page "area" is blank space, as the article has
stopped but the interwikis keep on going, and it feels as though the
page is a very weirdly laid-out way of referring people to different
languages.
(This is quite rare on enwiki these days because due to sheer numbers,
it's unusual to find a topic covered in ten or more languages which is
a mere stub on en. But there's still plenty of cases out there.)
Interestingly, even with the full list of languages, the page above
looks better in Vector than in Monobook:
http://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaa?useskin=vector
http://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaa?useskin=monobook
- dropping the "solid boxes" from the left-hand column means that it
doesn't look so dominant when expanded.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk