Hi Mark,
I'm assuming your "top 5" is based on article count.
I don't think that's right in this context, as it will be the visitors who see the error page - the articles aren't the ones looking at the error page, after all!
That would be, in order, English - Japanese - German - Spanish - French.
That top 5 would cover 80% of our visitors. (the top 3 would cover 70%, just English covers 40%)
Unfortunately (but for this purpose, fortunately), if you look at the graph of cumulative %age of visitors/day by rank in visitors/day, the curve is very very steep.
That means that with just a few languages, you can cover almost all visitors.
11 languages will cover 93%. In order: English - Japanese - German - Spanish - French - Polish - Dutch - Swedish - Chinese - Italian - Portuguese.
That also says a lot about us: most of these are languages which originate in Western Europe, the only exceptions being Japanese, Chinese, and Polish.
14 languages will cover 95%; just add Hebrew - Danish - Finnish to the end. (again, in that order)
You could try to unify the Scandinavian versions of the message (Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian), if you want to I can help with that.
23 languages will cover 97%, add Esperanto - Norwegian - Russian - Arabic - Slovene - Catalan - Malaysian - Korean - Romanian.
As you can see, the more languages you add the less quickly it approaches 100%.
So it really all depends on what ratio of server load to number of people who can read/understand it in their language you think is best...
My personal opinion is that the 11 languages is the best option.
It might also be a good idea to have a shorter message for the lower languages in the list.
Mark
On 07/06/05, ultrablue@gmail.com ultrablue@gmail.com wrote:
Sorry I couldn't actually throw together the multilingual page, but I was studying for exams and will be for the next couple of weeks. But once that's finished, I want to get back on track and complete putting together multilingual server error messages. I don't think it's acceptable on a site as multilingual as Wikipedia (and the other Wikimedia projects too) to only give English language error messages. I was hoping to get some help scripting a page with mechanics similar to the Wikipedia preferences page, whereby clicking a link changes the content, but where the content still displays correctly on older browsers. I started doing this about a month ago, but other things got in the way. We would have to decide which languages to include. In my semi-working prototype, I included only the top 5 languages, which I think were English, French, German, Swedish and Japanese. If we include too many languages, we run a risk of placing extra strain on the servers because the file size will inflate. Anyway, tell me what you think of my idea.
~Mark Ryan
On 6/8/05, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
ultrablue@gmail.com a écrit:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this mean you're shifting the servers across the street at 3AM? That's got to look suspicious :-)
If you're setting up a downtime page on the Paris squids, I recommend not including a link to Openfacts.berlios.de. Every time Wikipedia has even a mild downtime (i.e. about 3 minutes or less) that site gets overwhelmed and goes down itself. I don't think it's fair on whoever owns that site.
Well, your wishes were obeyed. The Paris squids showed to everyone accessing wikipedia, that we again had a crash, were trying to fix it, and would be back soon.
It was not a maintenance page which was shown, but a crash page. Not sure it is exactly good for our image.
Ant
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