On Sat, 22 Feb 2003 00:42:33 -0500, Tom Parmenter tompar@world.std.com wrote:
That doesn't tell me why three lists are better than one. Put it anywhere you like, but why duplicate it? More to the point, why have lists of languages that are *not* duplicates?
If I read Arabic, my eye would absolutely leap to a bit of Arabic text no matter where it appeared on the page, I am sure.
I believe we should have one list and it should be complete and not discriminate against any language that has a wikipedia project. In other words, all 30 languages, and when the Tagalog and Shoshone and Pig Latin editions are available, add 'em. If the list has 300 languages, well, cool. People will still be able to find their own language just as well with one list as with three.
I agree completely. I fail to detcet any logic behind the selection of the 10 languages on the "short" list. It certainly isn't based on number of speakers, and doesn't seem to be based on number of articles, which leaves the fact that they are all European languages feeling slightly offensive.
So I would suggest a text list of all languages on the main page, although I find the current strung-together list quite hard to read. A table or list layout might be better.
I do believe that a dropdown list/redirector would be the best way to offer a second listing. The main page could have both text and dropdown versions, and the dropdown form could be provided on some other pages. It could even be an off-by-default user option on all pages (only multilingual users are likely to enable it). The dropdown could be a static include, generated and distributed to the various wikipedias as part of the system for creating a new language.
How to present? Alphabetical order, according to the alphabet (or other equivalent sorting technique) of the language of the main page. Maybe there could be a link to other presentations, sorting by number of articles, chronological order of appearance, little flags, maps, pulldowns by linguistic groups . . .
Flags and maps are never good indicators of language. I agree that language names need to be written in their own language not the language of the page. Languages which use non-latin writing systems do need a latin variant to cope with user agents which can't handle unicode. (including speech browsers etc!)