On Sat, 22 Feb 2003, elian wrote:
Brion Vibber <vibber(a)aludra.usc.edu> writes:
spell trouble. People will check a few times,
then stop looking once
they've found that their language never comes up.
That is why I proposed the drop down boxes as a user pref. It should be
switched off by default to allow people to discover the multilinguality of
wikipedia. But if someone speaks only one language and isn't interested in
others his GUI shouldn't be cluttered up with for him useless language
links.
Sure, as a user pref it might theoretically be okay, but it doesn't help
the primary point of contention, which is that 1st-time visitors, who are
not logged in, and who may have smaller browser windows than those of us
with million x million pixel screens, need to be presented with language
links without it stealing the enirety of their screen.
Thomas' idea of taking the language code is
another idea I would favour.
Again, great for those of familiar with the codes -- but most people are
not. People _are_ familiar with their own country's country code (it's in
all the URLs after all), but that doesn't help in but a handful of cases
where country and language match up both in range and in the letters
eelected for the code.
BTW, in some Wikipedias (Czech, Esperanto, Svedish,
Polish) the language
links are translated into this language, making it difficult for someone
who doesn't know czech f.e. to find the link to "his" wikipedia. Maybe we
should add a comment in Language.php that the list of languages should not
be touched and localized.
Those instructions are already there, just ignored or not yet followed.
I'd prefer that we can get a complete list of native names for all those
languages so we can just yank the list out of the localized messages file
entirely.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)