On Sun, 18 Mar 2012 21:22:03 -0700, <jidanni(a)jidanni.org> wrote:
Ah, all along the seemingly consistent order of
available languages on
the bottom of each page depends on hand sorting them in the source of
each page.
Pretty much... just like categories.
Let's imagine it is the year 2050 and each article
has been translated
into each language. A simple misplaced language would e.g., cause ZH
users, who are used to looking for their language at the bottom, to not
find it.
Also some authors might think, "ZH is the worlds most populous language,
it belongs on the top!" So to prevent anarchy consider some standard
sort automatically implemented.
Except language sorting is even more chaotic than
sorting category names
on a multilingual wiki (different languages sort the same set of special
letters differently).
What do you sort by?
By lang code? But that's a technical bit that has nothing to do with the
user.
By name in English? But that has nothing to do with the name the user is
expecting.
By native name? But that's sorting by letters, with multiple scripts,
different languages sort things differently, and some don't even have
rules for how to sort some characters. Things still end up in places
people aren't expecting. And it 'still' isn't a fair way to sort things.
By wiki size, activity, link popularity? Now the language system has to
start tracking piles of data that isn't even available locally. It has to
fetch data from remote wikis and some of that data might not even exist.
It's also an immense amount of code.
By language we expect the user to want? Sure... but that's only part of
the list. And worse our pages our static. We can't go and start varying by
Accept-Language causing the cache size Wikipedia takes up to be multiplied
by over 100.
OK, enough FUD from me today, bye.
;) Long as
you know where you stand.
--
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [
http://daniel.friesen.name]