2010/6/2 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:13 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:

...

Hello,

For part 1, see [1].

In his reply to User experience feedback [2], Howief says: "the language links were used relatively infrequently based on tracking data".

Is there any data about their usage since the switch to Vector?

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.

In my opinion, the world is not best served by hyper-optimizing for the most frequent and shallow interests of the largest majorities.

That's exactly my opinion, too. I am trying to back it with data.

-- אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי Amir Elisha Aharoni

http://aharoni.wordpress.com

"We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

I would like to know as follows * the data mentioned * differences between language groups: does every language group use interlanguage links rarely or some of them use it often? For instance, in a small wikis? * Is there any way to choose if those hiding-by-default boxes are visible by user preferences?

Honestly I am surprised this change which wasn't so during the beta test, and personally as an multilingual, slightly annoyed by an increased number of clicks, I know it makes a sense to weigh the majority's preferences, but if there is no other option, it reduces usability for me as individual.

Cheers,

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 4:10 AM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:

2010/6/2 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com

...

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:13 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:

...

Hello,

For part 1, see [1].

In his reply to User experience feedback [2], Howief says: "the language links were used relatively infrequently based on tracking data".

Is there any data about their usage since the switch to Vector?

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.

In my opinion, the world is not best served by hyper-optimizing for the most frequent and shallow interests of the largest majorities.

That's exactly my opinion, too. I am trying to back it with data.

-- אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי Amir Elisha Aharoni

http://aharoni.wordpress.com

"We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

---

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On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 3:48 PM, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:

...

Who cares if people click them a lot?  The space they formally occupied is filled with nothing now.

Interface clutter is not psychologically free.  Empty space is better than space filled with mostly-useless controls.  Whether these particular controls are worth it I don't know, but the general principle of hiding seldom-used things is sound.

Mostly-useless is not the same as infrequent.

I think that this is a critical error people make when trying to be data-driven. (I strongly support and promote data driven decision making, but also fear that it can be so frequently misused)

For example, the stats show 14 million page views a day from blackberry. 14m is not frequent compared to 3.6billion. (0.0038 BB users per user), and yet that number represents an enormous number of people in _absolute terms_ whos ability to use Wikipedia may be degraded, disrupted, or completely inhibited right now.

Likewise, I do not doubt that only "One in big_number" followed an interwiki link, but the fact that more people use the site doesn't remove the value received by the smaller group ... which, because of the size of the site, might still consist of a hundred thousand people.

You can attempt a weighted cost comparison: Num_interwiki_users * Cost_of_hiding vs Everyone_else * Cost_of_clutter. But even that will inevitably lead to bad conclusions for some issues because the costs are usually not linear things: A tiny benefit to a hundred million people wouldn't justify making wikipedia very hard to use for a hundred thousand, ... because a zillion tiny benefits can often never really offset a smaller number of big costs.

Contention about applying linear costing to things with non-linear or outright incomparable values is why people get worked up when deaths get imported into a cost/benefit analysis. It is somewhat crude of me to compare killing someone with inhibiting their use of Wikipedia, but I think the same problem with cost/benefit analysis exists there— if only in a very reduced form.

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 6:30 PM, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 5:51 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:

...

You can attempt a weighted cost comparison:    Num_interwiki_users * Cost_of_hiding   vs   Everyone_else * Cost_of_clutter.    But even that will inevitably lead to bad conclusions for some issues because the costs are usually not linear things:   A tiny benefit to a hundred million people wouldn't justify making wikipedia very hard to use for a hundred thousand,  ... because a zillion tiny benefits can often never really offset a smaller number of big costs.

They can't?  Why not?

. . . well, I can expand on this a bit. Wikipedia's goals can be summarized as "Give people access to free knowledge". This can be measured lots of different ways, of course. But I see no reason why they shouldn't all scale more or less linearly in the number of people affected. If we can get an extra piece of useful information to a billion people over the course of a year, why isn't that a billion times better on average than getting an extra piece of useful information to one person, for any definition of "useful"? If it isn't exactly a billion times, why should we believe that it's less than a billion (as you seem to suggest) rather than more?

Cost-benefit analyses involving death are the same. People would like to claim that lives and money are incommensurable, say, but that's patently false. No one would advocate spending a trillion dollars to save one person's life -- if nothing else, you could save many people's lives for the same amount. Even if your only goal is to save lives in the short term, a life is worth *at most* X dollars, because you can straightforwardly exchange dollars for lives saved. In practice, X is probably less than 1,000 if you spend it right.

When you deal with everyday situations, then saying "lives and money are incommensurable" is a good enough approximation. It doesn't work if you have lots of lives, or lots of money, or ways to exchange lives and money that don't come up in everyday situations.

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 6:28 PM, Noein pronoein@gmail.com wrote:

When you enter your car and drive to your destination, you make hundreds of gestures but use only once the key, at the beginning.

And it would be a mistake to omit the keyhole altogether, or to make it hard to find if you look. But there's no need to make it as obtrusive and easy to reach as the steering wheel or the pedals. Indeed, you shouldn't, because that would take away attention and space from things that are more often used.

A probable scenario: people reaching wikipedia on a foreign language click just once on the correct language, then may browse hundreds of articles without changing the language again.

Is this probable? What are people's reasons for using interlanguage links? How many people miss them now that they're collapsed -- among the readership as a whole, not the extremely vocal and committed editors who read foundation-l and will find them easily anyway?

Aryeh, imagine someone links you to an article on physics at ka.wikipedia. If there were a link that said "English", you'd know what that meant, but if there's just a button that says "ენები" (Georgian for "Languages"), how are you going to know to click that rather than any of the other words on the page that to you probably appear little more than gibberish? (assuming you don't read Georgian - if I'm wrong, substitute it for any language that you don't know)

Mark

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 5:09 PM, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 6:30 PM, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:

...

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 5:51 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:

...

You can attempt a weighted cost comparison:    Num_interwiki_users * Cost_of_hiding   vs   Everyone_else * Cost_of_clutter.    But even that will inevitably lead to bad conclusions for some issues because the costs are usually not linear things:   A tiny benefit to a hundred million people wouldn't justify making wikipedia very hard to use for a hundred thousand,  ... because a zillion tiny benefits can often never really offset a smaller number of big costs.

They can't?  Why not?

. . . well, I can expand on this a bit.  Wikipedia's goals can be summarized as "Give people access to free knowledge".  This can be measured lots of different ways, of course.  But I see no reason why they shouldn't all scale more or less linearly in the number of people affected.  If we can get an extra piece of useful information to a billion people over the course of a year, why isn't that a billion times better on average than getting an extra piece of useful information to one person, for any definition of "useful"?  If it isn't exactly a billion times, why should we believe that it's less than a billion (as you seem to suggest) rather than more?

Cost-benefit analyses involving death are the same.  People would like to claim that lives and money are incommensurable, say, but that's patently false.  No one would advocate spending a trillion dollars to save one person's life -- if nothing else, you could save many people's lives for the same amount.  Even if your only goal is to save lives in the short term, a life is worth *at most* X dollars, because you can straightforwardly exchange dollars for lives saved.  In practice, X is probably less than 1,000 if you spend it right.

When you deal with everyday situations, then saying "lives and money are incommensurable" is a good enough approximation.  It doesn't work if you have lots of lives, or lots of money, or ways to exchange lives and money that don't come up in everyday situations.

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 6:28 PM, Noein pronoein@gmail.com wrote:

...

When you enter your car and drive to your destination, you make hundreds of gestures but use only once the key, at the beginning.

And it would be a mistake to omit the keyhole altogether, or to make it hard to find if you look.  But there's no need to make it as obtrusive and easy to reach as the steering wheel or the pedals. Indeed, you shouldn't, because that would take away attention and space from things that are more often used.

...

A probable scenario: people reaching wikipedia on a foreign language click just once on the correct language, then may browse hundreds of articles without changing the language again.

Is this probable?  What are people's reasons for using interlanguage links?  How many people miss them now that they're collapsed -- among the readership as a whole, not the extremely vocal and committed editors who read foundation-l and will find them easily anyway?

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On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 3:39 PM, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.comSimetrical%2Bwikilist@gmail.com

wrote:

In the absence of further data, the only real argument I saw for restoring the interlanguage links by default is to show how international Wikipedia is and raise awareness about how many other languages are supported. In this case they aren't actually meant to be clicked on, so a low click rate isn't a problem. They're more of an advertisement. This is a fairly reasonable argument -- the huge size of the language list is a plus, not a minus, from this perspective. I don't know if it outweighs concerns about clutter, though. Maybe.

It isn't a bad argument, I know I consider it a good one, but the biggest problem I see at the moment is that I don't think normal users have any IDEA that they are hidden over there. I have yet to meet a reader who realizes that. I said earlier that I had had 5 people ask me why we got rid of the language links. I've had 2 more ask since then ask and 2 of the original 5 call me up and ask me to explain where the button was to show the languages because even after I told them it was there they couldn't find it. I would love to see a survey that asked readers if they saw them but I don't know exactly how you could word it. Obviously I'm someone who wants them there (for many reasons, the international component not a small one among them) and so am bias about it but I just don't see the argument that having them there causes to many issues.

I also don't totally understand the "the user just has to click once and then they're set" argument. I've found that even as a user who is wandering around logged in I find myself having to click to open up the language links several times a day. I keep forgetting to throw something into my global.js so that it isn't an issue for me personally but :/

James Alexander james.alexander@rochester.edu jamesofur@gmail.com

Aryeh Gregor wrote:

Users don't explicitly complain about small things.

At the English Wikipedia, this is not so. If we had a bike shed, there would be daily complaints about its color.

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.

But if you take away a feature that's important to a small number of users, or that's well established and people are used to it, you'll get lots of complaints from a tiny minority of users.

I realize that, and I once had a high-profile edit reverted because a tiny number of users (out of a very large number affected) complained.

However, assuming that the interwiki links benefit a relatively small percentage of users (still a non-negligible number in absolute terms), I've yet to see evidence that displaying them by default is problematic. Like David Gerard, I desire access to the data behind this decision.

David Levy

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 4:21 PM, David Levy lifeisunfair@gmail.com wrote:

At the English Wikipedia, this is not so.  If we had a bike shed, there would be daily complaints about its color.

I should say that *almost no* users complain about small things. A tiny group of committed users will complain about small things, but they're not the targets of the Usability Initiative, so their complaints are not relevant here, *except* insofar as they provide reasoning or evidence about what most users think. By contrast, complaints from occasional users are useful in usability discussions even if the users provide no reasoning, because the complaints are ipso facto evidence of a problem. (But if we have only anecdotal evidence of complaints from occasional users, of course, that needs to be treated with the same caution as any anecdotal evidence.)

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.

My first guess would be that people didn't complain about interwiki links' clutter because they've always been there. By the time you're comfortable enough with the site to complain, you just won't notice them. I'd guess that the complaints you see are when things *change*. Experienced users are prone to complain when things change, because they've gotten used to how things are. If we leave off the links for a year, then turn them back on, I predict we'd get complaints about clutter.

However, assuming that the interwiki links benefit a relatively small percentage of users (still a non-negligible number in absolute terms), I've yet to see evidence that displaying them by default is problematic.  Like David Gerard, I desire access to the data behind this decision.

Then say exactly what evidence you desire. What test would you suggest to see whether hiding the links helped or harmed things?

On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 1:30 AM, David Levy lifeisunfair@gmail.com wrote:

Said data indicated only that the interwiki links were used relatively infrequently.  Apparently, there is absolutely no data suggesting that the full list's display posed a problem.  Rather, this is a hunch based upon the application of a general design principle whose relevance has not been established.

Aryeh Gregor: You cited the importance of data (and the systematic analysis thereof).  In light of this explanation, what is your opinion now?

Data is important. It's also not always possible to gather. When multiple things are competing for attention, you can make one or the other more prominent, and it will get correspondingly more clicks. But it's up to your judgment to assess whether that's a good thing or a bad thing: are more people finding what they actually want, or are people being distracted from what they actually want? If we have more clicks on interlanguage links and less on other interface elements, is that good or bad? If we wanted to maximize clicks on interlanguage links, we could always put them above the article text, so you have to scroll through them to get to the article text . . . but that's obviously ridiculous.

As Greg said above, data is important, but it can be hard to apply correctly. Sometimes you really have to use judgment. But we could still use more data -- for instance, why do people usually click interlanguage links? Do they usually understand the language they're reading the article in, or not? We could have a little multiple-choice question that pops up a small percentage of the time when people click on an interlanguage link.

My suspicion is that a long list is not ideal. Yes, people will see it for what it is and they'll be able to find their language easily enough if they look. But it's distracting, and it's not obvious without (in some cases) a lot of scrolling whether there's anything below it. If we could use some heuristic to pick a few languages to display, with a prominent "More" link at the bottom, I suspect that would be superior.

But first we should gather data on click rates for the list fully expanded and unexpanded. Per-page click rates are important here -- many articles have no interlanguage links, so will obviously pull down the average click rate despite being unaffected by the change. What's the trend like as articles have more interlanguage links? How many more interlanguage clicks are there for articles in twenty languages as opposed to five? Can we plot that? For each wiki separately, for preference?

All this data gathering takes manpower to do, of course. Maybe the usability team doesn't have the manpower. If so, does anyone qualified volunteer? If not, we have to make decisions without data -- and that doesn't automatically mean "keep the status quo", nor "change it back if people complain loudly". It means someone who happens to be in charge of making the decision needs to make a judgment call, based on all the evidence they have available.

(By the way, I'm not an employee of Wikimedia and am sometimes not at all happy with how the usability team operates. I happen to think that they have a good point in this case, though, irrespective of how they made or enforced the decision.)

On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 11:14 AM, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:

...

"change it back if people complain loudly".  It means someone who happens to be in charge of making the decision needs to make a judgment call, based on all the evidence they have available.

Aryeh, I was under the (apparently mistaken?) impression that at Wikipedia, the community makes the decisions, something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mexico.Chis.EZLN.01.jpg

I have seen a chorus of voices against this change, many have presented good, coherent arguments (despite your claim to the contrary). The community has spoken and continues speaking.

m.

---

The counterargument goes along these lines 1) the complains are just because somethign is changed (the fact that this was used the other way "if there weren't interwikis, adding them would cause complain" proves it's really not an argument for or against something, and definitely it is not a way to argue removing them is the proper course of action 2) The interwikis were not really frequantly used, so removing them isn't that harmful (which is not an argument **for** removing it's an argument about situation now not being as bad as it could be) 3) decision was made by "experts" (usability team) and they know better than community about what a non-regular user needs.

Aryeh Gregor wrote:

Because evidence is a great thing, but judgment is necessary too. It would be nice if you could do everything strictly based on evidence, but real life isn't so simple.

Agreed. So why are you dismissing people's arguments on the basis that they stem from such judgement (while simultaneously passing similar judgement of your own)? You can't have it both ways.

It's entirely reasonable to vigorously disagree with others' arguments, of course. But when the rationale is "they are not backed by data," it's unreasonable to exempt the user experience team and yourself from this standard.

Just because there are complaints about *many* problems, doesn't mean there are complaints about *all* problems. Some problems draw few to no complaints, by their nature.

As previously noted, perceived clutter draws complaints.

If every problem really did trigger complaints, we wouldn't need usability studies -- we could find all problems by just looking at complaints. This isn't the case.

We've agreed that such comments mustn't be interpreted as representative samples, so the value of usability studies is clear.

However, this particular "problem" was identified *not* through such a study (despite the fact that one was ongoing), but through speculation stemming from a general design principle of questionable applicability.

There is ample evidence that when users are presented with more buttons to click, they take longer to find what they want and make more mistakes.

In my observation, a list of twenty interlanguage links is perceived *not* as twenty separate links, but as one coherent list. It's instantly clear that most or all of the labels are written in a language foreign to the user, and little or no time is spent examining them individually.

However, I'm not suggesting that my observation is sacrosanct; I welcome scientific data.

We can apply this generality to specific cases without having to directly check it every time.

Yes, but not when dealing with a materially different entity.

We don't have the budget to run a usability study on every individual possible problem.

Of course not. But for reasons explained throughout the discussion, many of us regard this feature as immensely important and feel that it should not be demoted in the absence of data indicating that the change is beneficial.

Howie Fung has acknowledged that additional data is needed, and I applaud this response.

David Levy

One thing that is undoubtedly good is that users now have the choice of displaying lists like the interwiki links, or not. The system seems to do a reasonable job remembering a user's preferences. Someone who prefers the interwiki links hidden can get them off his screen with a click.

But the interwiki links should be there when a user first comes to the site. In particular as the single word "Languages" on the left does not make it immediately apparent that you can view an Arabic, Spanish or Hebrew article on the same topic you are currently looking up. This is a big part of what Wikipedia's mission is about.

People in Europe and Asia are more likely to speak several WP languages than people in the US or UK. I would bet money that non-native English speakers, who represent a very substantial proportion of en:WP readers, make greater use of the interwiki links in en:WP than native speakers.

Andreas

--- On Sun, 6/6/10, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:

From: Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2 To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Sunday, 6 June, 2010, 16:40 On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 4:21 PM, David Levy lifeisunfair@gmail.com wrote:

...

At the English Wikipedia, this is not so.  If we had

a bike shed,

...

there would be daily complaints about its color.

I should say that *almost no* users complain about small things.  A tiny group of committed users will complain about small things, but they're not the targets of the Usability Initiative, so their complaints are not relevant here, *except* insofar as they provide reasoning or evidence about what most users think.  By contrast, complaints from occasional users are useful in usability discussions even if the users provide no reasoning, because the complaints are ipso facto evidence of a problem.  (But if we have only anecdotal evidence of complaints from occasional users, of course, that needs to be treated with the same caution as any anecdotal evidence.)

...

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.

My first guess would be that people didn't complain about interwiki links' clutter because they've always been there.  By the time you're comfortable enough with the site to complain, you just won't notice them.  I'd guess that the complaints you see are when things *change*. Experienced users are prone to complain when things change, because they've gotten used to how things are.  If we leave off the links for a year, then turn them back on, I predict we'd get complaints about clutter.

...

However, assuming that the interwiki links benefit a

relatively small

...

percentage of users (still a non-negligible number in

absolute terms),

...

I've yet to see evidence that displaying them by

default is

...

problematic.  Like David Gerard, I desire access to

the data behind

...

this decision.

Then say exactly what evidence you desire.  What test would you suggest to see whether hiding the links helped or harmed things?

On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 1:30 AM, David Levy lifeisunfair@gmail.com wrote:

...

Said data indicated only that the interwiki links were

used relatively

...

infrequently.  Apparently, there is absolutely no

data suggesting that

...

the full list's display posed a problem.  Rather,

this is a hunch

...

based upon the application of a general design

principle whose

...

relevance has not been established.

Aryeh Gregor: You cited the importance of data (and

the systematic

...

analysis thereof).  In light of this explanation,

what is your opinion

...

now?

Data is important.  It's also not always possible to gather.  When multiple things are competing for attention, you can make one or the other more prominent, and it will get correspondingly more clicks. But it's up to your judgment to assess whether that's a good thing or a bad thing: are more people finding what they actually want, or are people being distracted from what they actually want?  If we have more clicks on interlanguage links and less on other interface elements, is that good or bad?  If we wanted to maximize clicks on interlanguage links, we could always put them above the article text, so you have to scroll through them to get to the article text . . . but that's obviously ridiculous.

As Greg said above, data is important, but it can be hard to apply correctly.  Sometimes you really have to use judgment.  But we could still use more data -- for instance, why do people usually click interlanguage links?  Do they usually understand the language they're reading the article in, or not?  We could have a little multiple-choice question that pops up a small percentage of the time when people click on an interlanguage link.

My suspicion is that a long list is not ideal.  Yes, people will see it for what it is and they'll be able to find their language easily enough if they look.  But it's distracting, and it's not obvious without (in some cases) a lot of scrolling whether there's anything below it.  If we could use some heuristic to pick a few languages to display, with a prominent "More" link at the bottom, I suspect that would be superior.

But first we should gather data on click rates for the list fully expanded and unexpanded.  Per-page click rates are important here -- many articles have no interlanguage links, so will obviously pull down the average click rate despite being unaffected by the change.  What's the trend like as articles have more interlanguage links?  How many more interlanguage clicks are there for articles in twenty languages as opposed to five?  Can we plot that?  For each wiki separately, for preference?

All this data gathering takes manpower to do, of course.  Maybe the usability team doesn't have the manpower.  If so, does anyone qualified volunteer?  If not, we have to make decisions without data -- and that doesn't automatically mean "keep the status quo", nor "change it back if people complain loudly".  It means someone who happens to be in charge of making the decision needs to make a judgment call, based on all the evidence they have available.

(By the way, I'm not an employee of Wikimedia and am sometimes not at all happy with how the usability team operates.  I happen to think that they have a good point in this case, though, irrespective of how they made or enforced the decision.)

---

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Regarding clutter and ease of finding the right language I believe it helps a lot if the user realizes that the languages are listed in their native form and are mostly in alphabetic order. What often causes difficulty for me is the fact that the languages are often in some strange order (e.g. ordered by their country code instead of the displayed text, cf. Bahasa Indonesia, which makes it harder to spot with a glance whether the article exists on my home wiki or not ).

I would welcome the UX team's opinion on how to improve on the ordering and consistency of the links (e.g. where to put languages in different scripts in the order; would it be helpful if the user's suspected native tongue was offered more prominently by bolding it or putting it to the beginning of the list) without necessarily hiding the links. Could we use the technology used to guess the putative native tongue of our readers to offer them a chance to start the article in their native WP - possibly through Google Translator Toolkit, without sacrificing general usability and annoying our casual readers?

Best regards, Bence Damokos

MZMcBride wrote:

MZMcBride wrote:

...

As far as I'm aware, nobody has properly graphed interlanguage link occurrence on the English Wikipedia. The data I found querying non-redirects in the article namespace on the English Wikipedia is available here.[1] As you can see, 1774000 articles have 0 interlanguage links (53%). Looking at pages with 5 or fewer interlanguage links, it's 2948039 articles (88%).

Shimgray was kind enough to make a graphical representation of this data.[1]

MZMcBride

[1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enwp-interwiki-201006.svg

Very interesting. I wonder if the 90-language spike actually corresponds somehow with how many "featured" articles en-wiki has. I did a quick Mark I eye-ball count, and it didn't seem to be at the "A thousand articles every wikipedia should have" barrier.

Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

Aryeh Gregor wrote:

I should say that *almost no* users complain about small things.  A tiny group of committed users will complain about small things, but they're not the targets of the Usability Initiative, so their complaints are not relevant here, *except* insofar as they provide reasoning or evidence about what most users think.

I'm not claiming that most users complain. I'm noting that there are _some_ complaints when there's anything remotely worth complaining about (and sometimes even when there seemingly isn't).

So yes, it's true that any substantial change to the interlanguage links' default behavior would have generated complaints, regardless of whether it was a good idea. This, however, does not automatically render said complaints invalid.

If there were evidence that the longstanding configuration caused a problem addressed by the change, this likely would outweigh the complaints. There is no such evidence.

By contrast, complaints from occasional users are useful in usability discussions even if the users provide no reasoning, because the complaints are ipso facto evidence of a problem. (But if we have only anecdotal evidence of complaints from occasional users, of course, that needs to be treated with the same caution as any anecdotal evidence.)

Agreed. I don't assert that the anecdotal evidence proves that the change was detrimental. But we have *no* evidence (apart from speculation) that it was beneficial.

My first guess would be that people didn't complain about interwiki links' clutter because they've always been there.

Or maybe there simply wasn't a problem.

By the time you're comfortable enough with the site to complain, you just won't notice them.

We frequently receive complaints from unregistered users lacking any meaningful degree of familiarity with the site.

I'd guess that the complaints you see are when things *change*.

See above.

Experienced users are prone to complain when things change, because they've gotten used to how things are.

Even among experienced users, complaints don't arise only when something changes. In fact, people complain that design elements are "stale" and should undergo change for the sake of change.

If we leave off the links for a year, then turn them back on, I predict we'd get complaints about clutter.

You just explained why such a response is inevitable (and I agree).

Then say exactly what evidence you desire.  What test would you suggest to see whether hiding the links helped or harmed things?

Before investigating potential solutions, there should be evidence of a problem. I disagree with the strategy of implementing a significant UI modification on a hunch and testing to see whether this "helped or harmed things."

I don't know the extent to which the study is ongoing, but it should include (or should have included) questions intended to assess the harm (or lack thereof) caused by the interlanguage links' default visibility. Until this is shown to be detrimental, the links' utility (which we know to be nonzero) is irrelevant.

Additionally, Howie Fung has cited interlanguage link usage data as a major factor in the decision, and I find it very troubling that the team gathered such statistics exclusively from the English Wikipedia (given the intention to deploy a single setup across the board). It is not reasonable to assume that the links are used with comparable frequency at other Wikipedias (particularly the smaller ones, whose articles often contain less information).

But even if we go with the "0.95%" figure, I (and others) dispute the belief that this is negligible. It isn't clear whether this refers to users or clicks (as the explanation's wording conflicts in this respect), but let's assume that it refers to users. (If it refers to clicks, the percentage of users obviously is substantially higher.) At an organization like eBay or Rhapsody, a design element relied upon by ~1% of users could be considered expendable for the sake of a subjectively prettier layout. Conversely, at the Wikimedia projects, such a feature can be mission-critical.

The application of a general design principle (without due consideration of atypical circumstances that might render it inapplicable) is not a sound approach.

Data is important.  It's also not always possible to gather.

You cited "the absence of further data" as a reason to reject assertions stemming from speculation and anecdotal evidence. We now know that no attempt was made to gather the data needed to determine whether the change is beneficial (or even addresses an actual problem).

When multiple things are competing for attention, you can make one or the other more prominent, and it will get correspondingly more clicks. But it's up to your judgment to assess whether that's a good thing or a bad thing: are more people finding what they actually want, or are people being distracted from what they actually want? If we have more clicks on interlanguage links and less on other interface elements, is that good or bad?

There is no evidence that the interlanguage links are a distraction, let alone that users click on them at the expense of other links.

If we wanted to maximize clicks on interlanguage links, we could always put them above the article text, so you have to scroll through them to get to the article text . . . but that's obviously ridiculous.

Indeed, such placement obviously would impede access to the article text. There is no evidence that the actual placement acts in kind.

My suspicion is that a long list is not ideal.

Perhaps not. And when we have data indicating that an alternative setup is superior to the one currently preferred by the community, we should switch to it.

Erik Möller has outlined a sensible course of action.

David Levy

Aryeh Gregor wrote:

Now, mind you, I don't necessary support getting rid of the interlanguage links. I'm mostly objecting to the reasoning being brought forward for that point, which seems to be mostly:

• Some unknown number of users might somehow end up at a wiki they

don't understand and not be able to find the wiki they really want. Maybe. Except we have no data to suggest that this happens with non-negligible frequency. The evidence apparently indicates that few people use the interlanguage links.

• Lots of people have complained, therefore it must be a bad change.
• Interface clutter isn't important anyway.

The last two arguments are completely wrongheaded. The first might or might not have merit -- but no one has even attempted to propose what evidence we could gather to check it (I think). Most of the people making the first argument seem to assume without question that there *must* be a lot of people using the interlanguage links for this, or at least a significant number. This is not the way to conduct an informed discussion.

It was requested somewhere on this thread to publish the data of the interwiki usage before CollapsibleNav and after. The difference should give an estimate of people which would have used it but was unable to find it out (as opposed to those who found it but needed an extra click for that). Since I was asked "how would I search now?" when showing the new look, I can understand that people don't find the interwikis, which are less prominent than the search bar! How many? I don't have enough data. I consider James and Casey reports quite important, since they will be people actually reaching us, which reports are a tiny percentage of affected people (even from the community, but specially from the large mass).

In the absence of further data, the only real argument I saw for restoring the interlanguage links by default is to show how international Wikipedia is and raise awareness about how many other languages are supported. In this case they aren't actually meant to be clicked on, so a low click rate isn't a problem. They're more of an advertisement. This is a fairly reasonable argument -- the huge size of the language list is a plus, not a minus, from this perspective. I don't know if it outweighs concerns about clutter, though. Maybe.

That's an interesting point. I was also wondering how it related to the accuracy perception. A fluent wikipedian probably consider an topic better (or improvable) if it has many interwikis. Or many FAs. As opposed to an interwikiless article, which is deemed of poor quality.

These are probably automatisms we aren't aware of, so I don't see how it could be measured.

Gregory wrote:

Sort of tangentially, ... am I really the only one that frequently uses the Wikipedia inter-language links as a big translating dictionary?

Add me to the list of people which hover the interwikis to find out a translation.

On 5 June 2010 01:03, Howie Fung hfung@wikimedia.org wrote:

First, some background on the problem we're addressing and the design principle that we used.  Every situation is unique, but in the case of the interwikilinks, we believe the sheer number of language links, especially within the context of an information-heavy page, makes users "numb" to the list.  When people see large collections of things, they tend to group them all together as one object and not identify the individual parts that make the whole.

"We believe" = no data, then?

In a list of language links, people will immediately notice the one that they can read: their own language, i.e. the one they're looking for.

While we did not explicitly test for this during our usability studies (e.g., it wasn't included as a major design question), we did exercise judgement in identifying this as a problem, based partly on the applying the above design principle to the site, partly on the data.

You've just said it was on "judgement" and *not at all* on any data.

Thank you for your input.

This is implemented in each wiki's [[MediaWiki:vector.css]]. As such, if a wiki votes to reverse this interface change, and your proposed "compromise" solution - will they be able to do so, or will the Foundation impose the change upon them regardless? i.e., is this content control by the WMF? I ask based on the preremptory tone used by Trevor Parscal in reverting the original change.

- d.

Howie,

Thanks for your detailed message. I appreciate your efforts of trying to listen to the feedback from the community. However, even after listening to the discussion in the office today, and after reading your message, I still fail to understand the logic behind these decisions. I'm going to try and summarize your paragraphs into a few sentences; please tell me if I got something wrong

In a paragraph, you explain it is your belief that in Monobook, the long list of languages made it difficult for the user to identify this area as "a list of languages".

In the following paragraph, you say you tracked the clicks in the sidebar in Monobook, and found that less than 1% of users clicked on a language link. You then explain you hid the list of languages because this number showed it wasn't used.

Perhaps I'm just beating a dead horse, but, looking at these two arguments, a fairly reasonable hypothesis to make is that users don't click on the languages links *because* they don't realize it's there. A fairly reasonable design decision would be to try and make it more discoverable, and you could measure the impact easily by seeing if more users click on the language links.

Instead, you chose to hide the list completely. I still fail to see how this decision could be an attempt at fixing the issue you had discovered.

Maybe users don't think of a traffic jam as "a list of cars". But showing an empty road hardly makes things better.

On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 13:19, Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org wrote:

Hi all,

thank you for your summary, Guillaume. I would like to add to this a question based on Jon's insightful email:

the research you did on clicks etc, was apparently only on the English Wikipedia. Would it be an option to first do more research on how the links are used on the other projects? Out of the >700 projects to choose from, you unfortunately picked one where the clicking is most likely to be very different from all the other projects. Usually that is not a good basis to build decisions for all 700 projects on. Besides that, it seems you measured logged in users (since you mention comparing monobook vs vector, it seems that you measured people who switched before the Big Switch?) Perhaps you want to actually do research on how anonymous users work.

There's a few other things that would be interesting:

* comparing with country as well (to account for # languages people likely know, wether they're likely to be browsing their own language wikipedia) * effect of a long list of interwiki (altho you'd need to correct for wether there's likely a language they know well/better then the version they're currently reading) - I wonder if a long list makes it less likely for people to click on something * size of the article - do long articles interwikilinks get used less or not?

henna

Or you could simply restore the one-line code modification that provided the default behavior requested by the community (pending evidence that an alternative setup is beneficial).

Seconded. Just bring them back already. This is an imaginary problem you've come up with here. The community is pretty much literally begging for their return and I think we've offered a lot of very good arguments. Is this going to be the day that Wikipedia jumped the shark and users' opinions stopped counting? Please don't let it be.

M.

On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 7:30 AM, David Levy lifeisunfair@gmail.com wrote:

Howie Fung wrote:

...

While we did not explicitly test for this during our usability studies (e.g., it wasn't included as a major design question), we did exercise judgement in identifying this as a problem, based partly on the applying the above design principle to the site, partly on the data.

Said data indicated only that the interwiki links were used relatively infrequently.  Apparently, there is absolutely no data suggesting that the full list's display posed a problem.  Rather, this is a hunch based upon the application of a general design principle whose relevance has not been established.

I was searching for a way to exactly that, David, and you said it perfectly.

A usability principle may be universally accepted, but I can't think of a single one that can be applied to absolutely every case. What's happening now is a vocal minority disputing the application of one principle to one specific case, and with very little disagreement—we just seem to differ on matters of degree.

And yes, I'll echo others when I question the original rationale and suggest that the interpretation of what very little data was collected is completely wrong, but I think I'll direct my focus toward a practical fix, rather than just calling the usability team stupid.

Austin

On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 3:47 PM, David Levy lifeisunfair@gmail.com wrote:

Austin Hair wrote:

...

And yes, I'll echo others when I question the original rationale and suggest that the interpretation of what very little data was collected is completely wrong, but I think I'll direct my focus toward a practical fix, rather than just calling the usability team stupid.

Your last sentence surprised me, as I haven't seen anyone opine that the usability team is stupid (and I certainly am not suggesting anything of the sort).  Everyone makes mistakes, and we believe that one has been made in this instance.  As for a practical fix, one actually was implemented (and quickly undone).

Sorry if that wasn't clear—I didn't mean to indict you or anyone else for doing that; all I meant was that although I, personally, could easily focus on mistakes the usability team made, the way forward is to simply fix it to everyone's satisfaction.

Austin

On 5 June 2010 19:03, susanpgardner@gmail.com wrote:

Austin, think about who "everyone" is.  The folks here on foundation-l are not representative of readers.  The job of the user experience team is to try to balance all readers' needs, which is not easy, and will sometimes involve making decisions that not everyone agrees with. People here have given some useful input, but I think it's far from obvious that the user experience team has made a "mistake.". (I'm not really intending to weigh in on this particular issue -- I'm speaking generally.)

The readers are not objecting on foundation-l. They are objecting on the blog.

I notice that Howie Fung avoided answering my question: What would it take for this decision to be reversed?

Also, you may be able to answer the question of what would happen if a wiki showed community conensus to remove this. Would the foundation forcibly keep it in place?

- d.

Well, I would have liked to mean, English speaking people is only 2/60 global population, it would be obvious though, I'd like to give a stat collection.

Cheers,

On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 3:40 AM, Aphaia aphaia@gmail.com wrote:

On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 3:03 AM,  susanpgardner@gmail.com wrote:

...

Sorry for top-posting.

Austin, think about who "everyone" is.  The folks here on foundation-l are not representative of readers.  The job of the user experience team is to try to balance all readers' needs,

Sue, not personal, but I think here I say, joining to the choir which Jon and Eia began: while English Wikipedia is the most visited websites of the Wikimedia, it is only 50% and most of its readers are English Speaking. They have no good reasons I believe to representative the rest of us non-English speaking people who are 2/60 of this planet.

What is the good reason usability team thought data from English Wikipedia visitors' behaviors and alone were enough to design for all other 200+ languages' readership? It looks me an obvious mistake in opposition of your statement.

which is not easy, and will sometimes involve making decisions that not everyone agrees with. People here have given some useful input, but I think it's far from obvious that the user experience team has made a "mistake.". (I'm not really intending to weigh in on this particular issue -- I'm speaking generally.)

...

Aryeh Gregor has said a couple of very smart things in this thread, particularly this bit I'll quote below:

"Users don't explicitly complain about small things.  They especially don't complain about things like clutter, because the negative effect that has is barely perceptible -- extra effort required to find things.  But if you take away a feature that's important to a small number of users, or that's well established and people are used to it, you'll get lots of complaints from a tiny minority of users.  Basing development decisions on who complains the loudest is what results in software packed with tons of useless and confusing features and lousy UI.  Like most open-source software, including MediaWiki.  Good design requires systematic analysis, ignoring user complaints if the evidence indicates they're not representative."

Thanks, Sue

-----Original Message----- From: Austin Hair adhair@gmail.com Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2010 15:56:26 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad        Idea, part 2

On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 3:47 PM, David Levy lifeisunfair@gmail.com wrote:

...

Austin Hair wrote:

...

And yes, I'll echo others when I question the original rationale and suggest that the interpretation of what very little data was collected is completely wrong, but I think I'll direct my focus toward a practical fix, rather than just calling the usability team stupid.

Your last sentence surprised me, as I haven't seen anyone opine that the usability team is stupid (and I certainly am not suggesting anything of the sort).  Everyone makes mistakes, and we believe that one has been made in this instance.  As for a practical fix, one actually was implemented (and quickly undone).

Sorry if that wasn't clear—I didn't mean to indict you or anyone else for doing that; all I meant was that although I, personally, could easily focus on mistakes the usability team made, the way forward is to simply fix it to everyone's satisfaction.

Austin

---

foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

-- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD

Wikipedia is a multilingual reference work. The visibility of the interwiki links made that plain. Please restore them.

A.

--- On Sat, 5/6/10, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a BadIdea, part 2 To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Saturday, 5 June, 2010, 19:47 On 5 June 2010 19:40, Aphaia aphaia@gmail.com wrote:

...

What is the good reason usability team thought data

from English

...

Wikipedia visitors' behaviors and alone were enough to

design for all

...

other 200+ languages' readership? It looks me an

obvious mistake in

...

opposition of your statement.

Indeed. There appears to be *no* community or reader groundswell in favour of hiding the interwiki links by default.

Where are the fans? So far I see Aryeh in favour. Is there anyone else? On foundation-l or the blog?

If this is such a good idea, where are the voices in favour, outside the Foundation staff?

For a decision that directly contradicts the words of the mission statement, by hampering the process of people finding knowlege in their own language, this really does not appear good enough.

Where is the communtiy or reader groundswell *in favour* of this move? It appears nonexistent.

• d.

---

foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

I'm not weighing in on the specific issue Aphaia, and I'm sure Howie will say more next week. My point is just what I said: the UX team is trying to balance all users' needs, which may or may not be the same as the extremely committed super-users who post here. Feedback is great, but it irritates me when people start using words like "stupid" -- that's what I was responding to.

Thanks, Sue -----Original Message----- From: Aphaia aphaia@gmail.com Date: Sun, 6 Jun 2010 03:40:22 To: susanpgardner@gmail.com; Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a BadIdea, part 2

On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 3:03 AM, susanpgardner@gmail.com wrote:

Sorry for top-posting.

Austin, think about who "everyone" is.  The folks here on foundation-l are not representative of readers.  The job of the user experience team is to try to balance all readers' needs,

Sue, not personal, but I think here I say, joining to the choir which Jon and Eia began: while English Wikipedia is the most visited websites of the Wikimedia, it is only 50% and most of its readers are English Speaking. They have no good reasons I believe to representative the rest of us non-English speaking people who are 2/60 of this planet.

What is the good reason usability team thought data from English Wikipedia visitors' behaviors and alone were enough to design for all other 200+ languages' readership? It looks me an obvious mistake in opposition of your statement.

which is not easy, and will sometimes involve making decisions that not everyone agrees with. People here have given some useful input, but I think it's far from obvious that the user experience team has made a "mistake.". (I'm not really intending to weigh in on this particular issue -- I'm speaking generally.)

Aryeh Gregor has said a couple of very smart things in this thread, particularly this bit I'll quote below:

"Users don't explicitly complain about small things.  They especially don't complain about things like clutter, because the negative effect that has is barely perceptible -- extra effort required to find things.  But if you take away a feature that's important to a small number of users, or that's well established and people are used to it, you'll get lots of complaints from a tiny minority of users.  Basing development decisions on who complains the loudest is what results in software packed with tons of useless and confusing features and lousy UI.  Like most open-source software, including MediaWiki.  Good design requires systematic analysis, ignoring user complaints if the evidence indicates they're not representative."

Thanks, Sue

-----Original Message----- From: Austin Hair adhair@gmail.com Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2010 15:56:26 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad        Idea, part 2

On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 3:47 PM, David Levy lifeisunfair@gmail.com wrote:

...

Austin Hair wrote:

...

And yes, I'll echo others when I question the original rationale and suggest that the interpretation of what very little data was collected is completely wrong, but I think I'll direct my focus toward a practical fix, rather than just calling the usability team stupid.

Your last sentence surprised me, as I haven't seen anyone opine that the usability team is stupid (and I certainly am not suggesting anything of the sort).  Everyone makes mistakes, and we believe that one has been made in this instance.  As for a practical fix, one actually was implemented (and quickly undone).

Sorry if that wasn't clear—I didn't mean to indict you or anyone else for doing that; all I meant was that although I, personally, could easily focus on mistakes the usability team made, the way forward is to simply fix it to everyone's satisfaction.

Austin

---

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On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 3:37 PM, David Levy lifeisunfair@gmail.com wrote:

Sue Gardner wrote:

...

Feedback is great, but it irritates me when people start using words like "stupid" -- that's what I was responding to.

Perhaps you misread the context.  Austin wrote the word "stupid" as a hypothetical example of nonconstructive commentary that should be avoided.  No one has hurled an insult.

Moreover "feedback" can itself be perceived as an insult.

Imagine that someone cleaning your office took your important paperwork and dumped it in a bin. You complain— "Hey we need that stuff to be accessible!" and they retort "Thank you for your _feedback_. We'll consider it during our future cleaning plans".

We're not just providing feedback here. We're collectively making a decision, as we've always done, thank you very much.

Gregory Maxwell writes:

...

Imagine that someone cleaning your office took your important paperwork and dumped it in a bin. You complain— "Hey we need that stuff to be accessible!" and they retort "Thank you for your _feedback_. We'll consider it during our future cleaning plans".

We're not just providing feedback here. We're collectively making a decision, as we've always done, thank you very much.

Well put.

It's great to see new things being tried. It seems to me this sort of change (any big change) might work out more smoothly if the final implementation of any major change was separated from its development. That implementation can be handled by people who have long experience specifically with collective decisions, rolling out changes, identifying and isolating controversial bits, &c.

We're not bad at that within community discussions -- and the "line-item rollback" ability for people to simply undo specific changes that irk them makes this much, much easier to manage.

Any time a central process becomes a bottleneck to "considering feedback" it becomes harder to swiftly reach a harmonious conclusion.

On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 5:20 PM, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:

I am convinced that the unique organizational structure of our organization, in which the community has historically been given a very high level of authority in the decision-making process, is one of the key elements of our success.

Almost certainly.

Have we entered a new chapter in our history as a community in which we, the people who have helped build this project, no longer get to help make the important decisions by contributing our ideas and venting our frustrations?

Absolutely not.

SJ

PS - as one more data point on the interlang links specifically: I also use the rollover text of interlanguage links for translation - even when I have other good translation resources handy. That is one of our great accomplishments, and we should make more noise about it, not less. :-)

Sue Gardner wrote:

The folks here on foundation-l are not representative of readers.

Many novice users have expressed confusion, frustration and disapproval. This isn't a representative sample either, but it's the only reader feedback that we have (to weigh against the user experience team's hunch).

The job of the user experience team is to try to balance all readers' needs, which is not easy, and will sometimes involve making decisions that not everyone agrees with.

Agreed. But we've established that the usability study did not include this issue. So while it's difficult to determine the extent to which users have been adversely affected, there is no evidence that *any* users were adversely affected by the previous setup or benefited from the change.

This is not to say that no improvement is possible. We simply don't know at this juncture. What's so unreasonable about the request to restore the longstanding behavior (with the additional option to collapse the links) until evidence of an actual problem (and net benefit of the change) exists?

People here have given some useful input, but I think it's far from obvious that the user experience team has made a "mistake.".

Setting aside the issue of whether the change was beneficial (which would require formal research to accurately assess), I strongly believe that implementing it on the basis of speculation (with no advance consultation with or notification to the community, despite the existence of a beta test program) was a mistake.

I also find it extremely troubling that the team has interpreted interwiki link usage data from the English Wikipedia as applicable to all Wikimedia wikis (given the intention to deploy this setup across the board). I would be shocked to learn that the interwiki links don't receive substantially more use within other Wikipedias (particularly the smaller ones, whose articles often contain less information).

David Gerard wrote:

I notice that Howie Fung avoided answering my question: What would it take for this decision to be reversed?

Also, you may be able to answer the question of what would happen if a wiki showed community conensus to remove this. Would the foundation forcibly keep it in place?

I also wait the answers to these questions.

David Levy

On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 8:03 PM, susanpgardner@gmail.com wrote:

Austin, think about who "everyone" is.  The folks here on foundation-l are not representative of readers.  The job of the user experience team is to try to balance all readers' needs, which is not easy, and will sometimes involve making decisions that not everyone agrees with. People here have given some useful input, but I think it's far from obvious that the user experience team has made a "mistake.". (I'm not really intending to weigh in on this particular issue -- I'm speaking generally.)

Regarding calling it a mistake, I'm making this judgment based not on my personal opinion—which is by now abundantly clear—but on the scientific basis that forming a conclusion without data makes for a bad conclusion.

It's true that I wouldn't bother to weigh in on the process if I agreed with the outcome. I think that's true for most of us. But since I'm bothering anyway, I may as well say that the process is flawed, and the decision doesn't logically follow the facts—since we haven't measured (scientific jargon, here) the facts in the first place.

Austin

On 2 Jun 2010, at 22:51, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

A tiny benefit to a hundred million people wouldn't justify making wikipedia very hard to use for a hundred thousand

Can you justify that the change has now made it very hard for users of those interlanguage links? Given that it's now one click away (click on 'languages' in the sidebar) the first time, and then it stays there afterwards (this menu does stay expanded after the first time it's opened, right?), I wouldn't have thought that would make it very hard.

I would support it being expanded by default, though (even though I rarely use it myself) simply because it's a lot less intuitive to find the language links now, and they're a big part of our mission (as Aryeh and others pointed out). It would also be nice if there were a link along the lines of "can't find the article in your language? start it!" (e.g. red interlanguage links).

As a very general observation: all of the Wikimedia wikis (both different languages and different projects) are essentially islands, with very few non-obvious bridges linking them together, which is a real shame. We need to build better bridges, and encourage people to use them more!

Mike Peel

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 2:24 AM, Michael Peel email@mikepeel.net wrote:

On 2 Jun 2010, at 22:51, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

...

A tiny benefit to a hundred million people wouldn't justify making wikipedia very hard to use for a hundred thousand

Can you justify that the change has now made it very hard for users of those interlanguage links? Given that it's now one click away (click on 'languages' in the sidebar) the first time, and then it stays there afterwards (this menu does stay expanded after the first time it's opened, right?), I wouldn't have thought that would make it very hard.

I would support it being expanded by default, though (even though I rarely use it myself) simply because it's a lot less intuitive to find the language links now, [snip]

I think you mostly answered your own question for the most part. But I think my statement was intended to be a more general statement about comparing costs than really a statement that this makes wikipedia very hard: OTOH, if you don't read the language well and are depending on the inter-language links to get you to the right article in the right wikipedia, then the change did indeed make the site very hard to use. This is the subject of Noein's car analogy.

I agree with the upthread comments on the roseate rectilinear lego-hat. It is as fertile a source of associations as any cloud could hope to be, but "language" is not among them.

OTOH, I could make the same criticism for the watchlist star, which has the additional sin of conflicting with the use of the star iconography used for featured articles.

As far as the the dynamic hiding goes, I'd like to toss in my voice against that: Determinism is very important for usability. Guessing what the user wants is great when it works but terrible when it doesn't. Computers are often _stupid_ but at least they tend to be consistent. The fact that you can learn to cope with their stupidity without much effort is often their one redeeming quality. Interface choices should favour determinism except when the cost of doing so is very high, the automatic mechanism is very very reliable, or the kind of non-determinism is very harmless and non-confusing.

Anyone who has tried to get wolfram alpha to perform a specific calculation and suffered through a half hour of swapping around your word order knows of the frustration that can come from the computer trying to be smart and failing.

In particular, that absence of a listing depends on an basically non-deterministic guess of what you want _AS WELL AS_ the article simply not existing is likely to be confusing. E.g. thinking an article only has a german version when the german version is featured.

At the same time I think that changing the order, typeface, color, or adding iconography based on automated smarts is far less likely to result in confusion and is probably an OKAY thing to do.

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 8:09 PM, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:

. . . well, I can expand on this a bit. Wikipedia's goals can be summarized as "Give people access to free knowledge". This can be measured lots of different ways, of course. But I see no reason why they shouldn't all scale more or less linearly in the number of people affected.

[snip]

Things like hiding inter-language links and switching to vector even though it locks out browsers used by many people more or less completely deny access to the site for people. I think it's really hard to justify effectively locking people out for the sake of the soft benefits of a great number of people.

I'm not saying that there is a true hard incomparability. In general I think that denying _one_ person the ability to effectively use the site unless they understake a costly change in their client would justified by a small improvement for the bulk of the users... but only that it doesn't form a nice neat linear relationship where you can directly trade readers to usability fluidness. ... and that, as you described it, incomparability is a useful approximation much of the time. The approximation only really starts to fall down when you can make a serious argument that there is a true like for like replacement e.g. loss of life = actually saves two lives, as distinct from loss of a life = makes 2000 people live 0.1% longer.

Sort of tangentially, ... am I really the only one that frequently uses the Wikipedia inter-language links as a big translating dictionary? I've found it to be much more useful than automatic translation engines for mathematical terms (both more comprehensive but also in that it makes it easy to find the translations for many related terms). The hiding doesn't make this any harder for me, but it would make me a lot less likely to discover this useful feature.

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:10 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:

Sort of tangentially, ... am I really the only one that frequently uses the Wikipedia inter-language links as a big translating dictionary?  I've found it to be much more useful than automatic translation engines for mathematical terms (both more comprehensive but also in that it makes it easy to find the translations for many related terms).  The hiding doesn't make this any harder for me, but it would make me a lot less likely to discover this useful feature.

Of course not, I do this all the time (I even wrote about it), but I don't have any idea how many non-wikipedians use the interwiki links in this manner. On the list of research projects I wish someone would get around to: I would love to know more about unexpected/atypical uses of the projects like this... I guess the reference desk is a similar feature, an unexpected service cropping up in the middle of the encyclopedia. I wonder what others there are.

-- phoebe

I used the interwiki links all the time in this manner at work, and still do. It was one of the things that turned me on to Wikipedia and caused me to start contributing, and eventually to register an account.

As others have said, if the interwiki links had not been visible by default, I likely would not have discovered the feature, or discovered it only much later.

An interesting thing is that even if the interwiki articles were poor, or incomplete, there was usually enough context provided to pick out the key terms in the field in the relevant languages, providing a starting point for further research and confirmation in and outside of Wikipedia. Extremely useful.

Even today the articles that are of the most practical benefit to me are very often C-Class or stubs.

Andreas

--- On Fri, 4/6/10, J Alexandr Ledbury-Romanov alexandrdmitriromanov@gmail.com wrote:

From: J Alexandr Ledbury-Romanov alexandrdmitriromanov@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2 To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Friday, 4 June, 2010, 9:27

Me three for using the interwiki links as a way of finding the word or phrase I'm looking for in another language (along with Wiktionary). Not only do they assist me in finding translations of the words or phrases I am looking for, they also give me context and relevant material for languages I'm comfortable using. They are also particularly useful for languages where I am not at all comfortable (e.g. Modern Standard Arabic) where I get results with images of the subject that confirm that I have found the right noun I need.

Sometimes I get false positives, but unlike with my various dictionaries which I now rarely use, I can usually figure out pretty quickly that I have not got the translation I need.

I'd be interested to know what the default languages I would get based computer profiling. Geolocating would put in me in Morocco (official language Modern Standard Arabic, though French is commonly used), browser configuration would give French, and Wikimedia system user preferences are set in English, simply because I predominantly use the English Wikipedia and English Wikinews; I'm far too lazy to have to translate the Wikimedia terminology in my head when navigating in French, German or Russian.

AD

2010/6/4 phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com

...

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:10 AM, Gregory Maxwell

gmaxwell@gmail.com

...

wrote:

...

Sort of tangentially, ... am I really the only

one that frequently

...

...

uses the Wikipedia inter-language links as a big

translating

...

...

dictionary?  I've found it to be much more

useful than automatic

...

...

translation engines for mathematical terms (both

more comprehensive

...

...

but also in that it makes it easy to find the

translations for many

...

...

related terms).  The hiding doesn't make

this any harder for me, but

...

...

it would make me a lot less likely to discover

this useful feature.

...

Of course not,  I do this all the time (I even

wrote about it), but I

...

don't have any idea how many non-wikipedians use the

interwiki links

...

in this manner. On the list of research projects I

wish someone would

...

get around to: I would love to know more about

unexpected/atypical

...

uses of the projects like this... I guess the

reference desk is a

...

similar feature, an unexpected service cropping up in

the middle of

...

the encyclopedia. I wonder what others there are.

-- phoebe

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On 7 June 2010 08:42, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:

Given the availability of translations that are just a click away, not even a native English speaker has to fear that clicking on an interwiki link will produce an unintelligible page. There could even be value to a double list which gives the option of viewing the other language article in its original form or in its machine translation.

There is a piece of user js which was implemented on en which does this, incidentally:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Manishearth/Scripts#Wikipedia_interwiki_tr...

- it turns, eg, "Espanol" into "Spanish (t)", with the (t) link going to a Google translate link for the target page.

I haven't used it much, but it's a useful tool to have.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1

When you enter your car and drive to your destination, you make hundreds of gestures but use only once the key, at the beginning. Yet without an easy, obvious access to the keyhole, you wouldn't drive at all. My point? Frequency of click is not the ultimate criterium. Some links are required to be easily and immediately available because of their importance (they may even be a requisite) and order of use.

A probable scenario: people reaching wikipedia on a foreign language click just once on the correct language, then may browse hundreds of articles without changing the language again. Since their first need may be to define the language, it should be obviously available and just one click away.

On 02/06/2010 21:48, Aryeh Gregor wrote:

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:

...

Who cares if people click them a lot? The space they formally occupied is filled with nothing now.

Interface clutter is not psychologically free. Empty space is better than space filled with mostly-useless controls. Whether these particular controls are worth it I don't know, but the general principle of hiding seldom-used things is sound.

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On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 10:20 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 5:48 AM, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:

...

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:

...

Who cares if people click them a lot?  The space they formally occupied is filled with nothing now.

Interface clutter is not psychologically free.  Empty space is better than space filled with mostly-useless controls.  Whether these particular controls are worth it I don't know, but the general principle of hiding seldom-used things is sound.

They are not "mostly-useless controls"; they are there because _building_ content _in every language_ is our mission.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Our_projects

Missing interwikis are a valuable cue that a block is missing.

Yes, this.

The list of available languages is a key part of a page, not a navigation nicety.

They used to be available at the top of an article by default, until that started taking up a few inches of screen space across the board. We could still use a small bit of text reading "also in N other languages" that is similarly prominent: above-the-fold, near the top of the page.

SJ

2010/6/2 Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com:

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:

...

Who cares if people click them a lot?  The space they formally occupied is filled with nothing now.

Interface clutter is not psychologically free.  Empty space is better than space filled with mostly-useless controls.  Whether these particular controls are worth it I don't know, but the general principle of hiding seldom-used things is sound.

(Taking English as example)

Problem is, for most readers with a first language other than English, English Wikipedia is now annoying and slightly less useful. someone coming from Google might find English Wikipedia (due to enormous pagerank) but really want to read in her own language; the collapsing may make them to simply close the window, and try the next result. Might seem too dramatic, but this happens in practice.

If one wants to talk about usability, it's important to keep track the most impaired users, because they have more urgent needs. (Yeah, people with little English skills are actually in a disadvantageous position on wiki-en: there are few multilingual clues at the first spot, and then the "see in the language I prefer" section is now behind an unnecessary "Languages")

[

BTW, I liked that "universal signs" idea of some poster I lost track here. I just think it doesn't really apply to the language list (that should be fully expanded), but rather to "Discussion", "Edit", etc

Some universal symbols:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_symbol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_symbol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_symbol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Symbol_of_Access

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_common_standards

If those (and others) were properly used on Wikipedia menus, it would be more accessible to people with poor English skills.

]

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 8:50 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@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. (I think I can recognize it in most European languages and maybe a handful of others, but that's still assuming I was actively looking for it in the first place.)

Last night I was discussing this with Finne (henna), and she proposed that we might show a default list based on the user's most likely language(s), while still keeping the others collapsed by default.

This could be done using the HTTP accept-language header—which would, at the very least, show you your native language. (And perhaps, if someone's feeling adventurous, augment that using a GeoIP system. There are lots of possibilities.)

But I'm not volunteering to code it, and I'm not asking anyone else to. I'd be happy if we just returned to the previous, useful behavior.

Austin

2010/6/3 Fajro faigos@gmail.com:

Maybe we should support the "Language Icon" idea:

http://languageicon.org/index-icon.php

That icon seems about as intuitive as the name "Hyperion Frobnosticating Endoswitch" for FlaggedRevs. The only relevant mental association that comes to mind is "robot tongue".

We have a couple threads on this issue but picking the most recent :). It appears that this has now been changed ( https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23497 ) and so once the next revision is pushed live the interwikis would be visible by default.

James Alexander james.alexander@rochester.edu jamesofur@gmail.com

It would be nice to actually have a place at the usability wiki to discuss this.

My own view is that the actual list of languages was the ideal interface object in fulfilling many purposes (as discussed in the posts above) and implying multiple levels of understanding without the need for explanation or discussion. For example, that it varied authomatically from article to article showed the overall level of progress on the multiple projects.

In showing Wikipedia to new users this list was always noticed and proved a very expressive statement.

The attitude shown by Trevor's reply speaks for itself in terms of the relationship between the "internal" experts and the community. I think that it was his wording that induced me to finally post on the issue.

I fixed it (it's a one-line change), but Trevor reverted it:

...

This goes against an intentional design decision. To discuss that decision further and submit proposals to change this design please contact Howie Fung <hfung at wikimedia.org> or visit http://usability.wikimedia.org

Any "see other languages" link should take into account the nature of the article; an article on a Japanese topic should display the Japanese wp link (if any) . This would not be impossible to do programmatically.

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 8:59 PM, Howie Fung hfung@wikimedia.org wrote:

Per Erik M.'s previous post, we're working on a compromise solution whereby we show a list based on user's most likely language(s), probably based on browser, and then a "see other languages" link which would expand to give all the other langauages.  We're also looking at changing the word "Languages" into something that's more descriptive of what the links actually do.

I've created the following page for more discussion/proposals on the topic:

http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Opinion:_Language_Links

Howie

On 6/3/10 4:41 PM, David Goodman wrote:

...

It would be nice to actually have a place at the usability wiki to discuss this.

My own view is that the actual list of languages was the ideal interface object in   fulfilling many purposes (as discussed in the posts above) and implying multiple levels of understanding without the need for explanation or discussion. For example, that it   varied authomatically from article to article   showed the overall level of progress on the multiple projects.

In showing Wikipedia to new users this list was always noticed and proved a very expressive statement.

The attitude shown by Trevor's reply speaks for itself in terms of the relationship between the "internal" experts and  the community. I think that it was his wording that induced me to finally post on the issue.

...

I fixed it (it's a one-line change), but Trevor reverted it:

...

This goes against an intentional design decision. To discuss that decision further and submit proposals to change this design please contact Howie Fung<hfung at wikimedia.org>  or visit http://usability.wikimedia.org

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John Vandenberg wrote:

While that is "impossible" (read: hard), a simple approximation is to display languages links for the 10 "largest" corresponding articles in other languages, and then show a "more.." when there are more than 10.

Another option is for contributors to specify which other interwiki links should be always visible; e.g. we would always want the FA's in other languages to be shown.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Link_FA

The KISS principle comes to mind here. Are there ways to improve the current language list in the future? Perhaps. But the best general solution (that's quickest to implement and doesn't rely on vaporware) is to simply fix the default.

Personally, I see a sidebar with a lot of room and nothing else to fill it, so I don't really understand the current set of objections to showing the languages by default. A minimalist interface design is a nice goal, but it isn't always the best pragmatically. And in this case, pragmatism should beat out idealism.

MZMcBride

Hoi, When you look where what languages have their biggest audience, you will be surprised. The notion of most likely languages is either based on such statistics or it is only guess work. The best performance is when people can choose the languages involved.

It would make sense to combine this with the Babel extension... Thanks, GerardM

On 4 June 2010 02:59, Howie Fung hfung@wikimedia.org wrote:

Per Erik M.'s previous post, we're working on a compromise solution whereby we show a list based on user's most likely language(s), probably based on browser, and then a "see other languages" link which would expand to give all the other langauages. We're also looking at changing the word "Languages" into something that's more descriptive of what the links actually do.

I've created the following page for more discussion/proposals on the topic:

http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Opinion:_Language_Links

Howie

On 6/3/10 4:41 PM, David Goodman wrote:

...

It would be nice to actually have a place at the usability wiki to discuss this.

My own view is that the actual list of languages was the ideal interface object in fulfilling many purposes (as discussed in the posts above) and implying multiple levels of understanding without the need for explanation or discussion. For example, that it varied authomatically from article to article showed the overall level of progress on the multiple projects.

In showing Wikipedia to new users this list was always noticed and proved a very expressive statement.

The attitude shown by Trevor's reply speaks for itself in terms of the relationship between the "internal" experts and the community. I think that it was his wording that induced me to finally post on the issue.

...

I fixed it (it's a one-line change), but Trevor reverted it:

...

This goes against an intentional design decision. To discuss that decision further and submit proposals to

change this

...

...

...

design please contact Howie Fung<hfung at wikimedia.org> or visit http://usability.wikimedia.org

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Hoi, It works indeed best for logged in users. However the statistics show that the main public for particular languages is not where you expect them to be.

It is good to be generous in the number of languages that we show in my opinion. Thanks, GerardM

On 4 June 2010 11:18, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

...

Hoi, When you look where what languages have their biggest audience, you will

be

...

surprised. The notion of most likely languages is either based on such statistics or it is only guess work. The best performance is when people

can

...

choose the languages involved.

However, 'letting people choose' is only workable for regular, logged-in users. If we're talking about anonymous users, guessing is more or less our only option. It's not an easy task, but luckily we can choose to have 3 or 4 languages rather than just one, so there is some margin of error. Still - geolocation usually doesn't go beyond country level, and for some countries we already have quite a number of languages. Usually one or a few languages will be enough to give everyone something they can speak well, but if we show only those, regional languages would not be shown to anyone at all, and thus miss out on a good advertising location.

-- André Engels, andreengels@gmail.com

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2010/6/4 Jon Harald Søby jhsoby@gmail.com:

When you are monolingual and are already on your native language Wikipedia there isn't really a lot of use in going to another language.

What's more, when that language is the one with the largest Wikipedia, you're likely to find the most comprehensive article of any language. Pretty much every time I see a non-Anglophone Wikimedian look something up on Wikipedia, though, they look it up in their native language first, then look for a link to the same article on enwiki (where there's probably a bigger article by virtue of sheer size) or another language they speak (for regional topics; e.g. a Flemish speaker checking frwiki for information on a city in Belgium).

Austin

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:17 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

Can someone from the Foundation confirm whether any testing was done with people who would actually be affected by the decision to remove the language links - or only on people who wouldn't care? If only the latter, then the stated reason for removal would be in serious need of urgent review.

I won't speak for the Foundation, but my understanding is that sampled click-rates were measured on the live site, so it would have been a representative sample of our visitors.

Andrew Garrett wrote:

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:17 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

...

Can someone from the Foundation confirm whether any testing was done with people who would actually be affected by the decision to remove the language links - or only on people who wouldn't care? If only the latter, then the stated reason for removal would be in serious need of urgent review.

I won't speak for the Foundation, but my understanding is that sampled click-rates were measured on the live site, so it would have been a representative sample of our visitors.

Ah. But were they sampled percentage of *sessions* that clicked an interwiki link at least once, or just percentage of clicks from the gross amount of clicks? I think the former is significant, while the latter is much less so.

Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

Mark Williamson wrote:

That's not good enough. First of all, people who don't speak a language won't recognize the text "see other languages", or even "languages". Could you pick the word "ენები" out of a page full of text in a foreign language and understand that clicking it would lead you to a link to the English version of an article?

Very well said.

Indeed, the interwiki links are pointedly presented in the relevant languages/scripts, and the readers for whom they're most useful are among the least likely to comprehend the label under which they've been hidden.

The reason your proposal to use geolocation or browser language is not good enough is that would still result in reducing the visibility of many, many Wikipedias. I think there are many users who would prefer to read articles in Catalan whose default browser language is set to ES, and geolocation will probably not solve that problem either.

It appears that the idea's ramifications haven't been fully considered (in part because it's difficult for speakers of one language to appreciate the needs of another language's speakers).

I think it is a mistake to hide ANY interwikis. "clutter" is not a huge sacrifice for people to make to vastly increase INTERNATIONAL usability.

Furthermore, I don't recall _ever_ encountering a complaint about this so-called "clutter." But I certainly have seen numerous complaints about the interwiki links' sudden removal (as many have perceived the change).

Perhaps a suitable compromise can be devised, but in the meantime, the only appropriate solution is to display the interwiki links by default. It's unfortunate that this fix was reverted, let alone in the name of "usability."

David Levy

Wow, we get it. *No one* likes the hidden interwiki language link. Bottom line, the only people who may be "annoyed"(though I doubt really any are, and this was rather a decision to simply neaten the overall look of the en site) by the long list of languages are the regular users! Those people who can afford to hide it because they are familiar with WP in general. When I first started using WP, it was one of the LAST things I noticed about the surrounding links/tools; imagine if it were hidden.... Enough about supposed numbers and statistics, it just needs to be fixed.

SOLUTION (as said by many before me) default: show interwiki language one click (if so desired by user/ip address): hidden

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 11:19 AM, Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net wrote:

Erik Moeller wrote:

...

2010/6/3 Fajro faigos@gmail.com:

...

Maybe we should support the "Language Icon" idea:

http://languageicon.org/index-icon.php

That icon seems about as intuitive as the name "Hyperion Frobnosticating Endoswitch" for FlaggedRevs. The only relevant mental association that comes to mind is "robot tongue".

As a sports fan, to me it looks like the backboard of a basketball hoop. I actually rather liked "Hyperion Frobnosticating Endoswitch", but such a wonderful name deserves to find a more worthy home than the MediaWiki pending changes feature.

I'm with Michael on this point: such a great name should be the name of the entire new skin, or perhaps a new version of MediaWiki itself: this 'pedia runs on HYPERION FROBNOSTICATING ENDOSWITCH technology. Alternatively, it could make the best magic word ever. Who knows what such a variable would do?

Re: list of languages, I like having the big list of languages present in the sidebar for the reasons David, Austin & Greg mentioned. (It's not exactly like our site is uncluttered even without it: every article is a *giant list of words*, surrounded by *even more words*, and people seem basically fine with this). In every presentation I make about Wikipedia I emphasize its multilingual nature -- being as multilingual as we are is both unique and special on the internet, and is one of the things that makes us great, and we should show this feature off as well as we can.

That said, having the # of languages and/or a global selector as others have mentioned are both good ideas too and could be a good compromise.

-- phoebe

Mariano Cecowski wrote:

--- El jue 3-jun-10, phoebe ayers escribió:

...

That said, having the # of languages and/or a global selector as others have mentioned are both good ideas too and could be a good compromise.

Can't we use a flag in a cookie to remember the choice of show/collapse the language list ? That is simple and elegant (like me!)

MarianoC.-

It does use it. What is being discussed here is the dafault, which is the one that will appear to users which, come to the wiki for first time (eg. random internet browser), change wikis (they are mainly active on one wiki, and crosschecks to other wikis, he will want the full interwiki list), and whenever you clear their cookies (something that should be done regularly).

Even if we show them expanded by default, there will be some people hiding them and unable to find them back, but that would (hopefully) be negligible.

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 1:24 PM, Austin Hair adhair@gmail.com wrote:

Last night I was discussing this with Finne (henna), and she proposed that we might show a default list based on the user's most likely language(s), while still keeping the others collapsed by default.

This could be done using the HTTP accept-language header—which would, at the very least, show you your native language.  (And perhaps, if someone's feeling adventurous, augment that using a GeoIP system. There are lots of possibilities.)

This is a good idea. It could be easily done in JavaScript without affecting cacheability, at least if you just use language info available to JS. (The collapsing is only done using JS to begin with.) But the content language in the browser is often unreliable, I've been told, so it's not a complete solution. Geolocation would be more reliable -- especially if we can pick the most likely few languages to display -- but much harder to implement properly.

On 3 June 2010 19:04, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:

Yes, we discussed this internally as well as a better path to exposse Wikipedia's multilingual nature than to dump a long list of native language names in the sidebar (we might have an expansion link such as "Show X other languages" to indicate the large number of language versions available).

This is a brilliant solution which should satisfy both concerns! How soon can we have this?

- d.

Gerard Meijssen wrote:

Hoi, This would be a good idea only when you are allowed to choose the languages you do want to see. Thanks, GerardM

The problem is, you don't have them configured the first time you visit the wiki, which is when you are more likely to use them. I am all for presenting them a nice interface for interwiki configuration, though.