The same was proposed by ChemicalBit on Meta some days ago http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metapub#Default_language_interface_.28Meta_and_other_project.29__depending_on_user.27s_browser_preference. My comment there was:
For example, I am active on Low Saxon Wikipedia. Low Saxon is a minority language with almost no technical support. There's no Windows or Internet Explorer in Low Saxon and no Firefox and only very few other programs. And very, very few websites, who use the browser's preference for presenting Low Saxon content instead of some other language (actually I know none at all and I would say, I know almost the whole net if we speak about Low Saxon content). Cause of that, there are even among native Low Saxons very few who have 'nds' as their browser's preference language. This would mean, that 95 % of all natives would get the Low Saxon Wikipedia with German, Dutch or English interface. But for multilingual projects, this would be appropiate. If I again look from the perspective of Low Saxon, this would be the first website(s) on the net which would set an incentive to set your browser to 'nds' preference. In any case browser's preference would be more appropiate than 'english first'.
Steve Bennett hett schreven:
This has probably been discussed before, but why does mediawiki (or at least, wikipedia) default to showing the interface in the language of the wikipedia, rather than in the language of the browser? E.g., when I visit ru.wikipedia.org, common sense dictates that the interface should be shown in English, the language defined in my browser preferences. Sure, I can change it by creating an account and defining my preferences, but even that is difficult enough on a foreign language Wikipedia, and extremely difficult for a non-Roman script.
What's the thinking here?
Steve