[Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:13 PM, Amir E. Aharoni
<amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> For part 1, see [1].
>
> In his reply to User experience feedback [2], Howief says: "the language
> links were used relatively infrequently based on tracking data".
>
> Is there any data about their usage since the switch to Vector?


Who cares if people click them a lot?  The space they formally
occupied is filled with nothing now.

They were equally valuable as a marketing statement about the breadth
and inclusiveness of our project as they were as a navigational tool.

Concealing them behind the languages box also significantly reduces
discoverability for the people who need it most: Someone who, through
following links, ends up on a wikipedia which is not in their primary
language. Before they needed to scroll down past a wall of difficult
to read foreign language, now they need to do that and expand some
foreign language box.

In my opinion, the world is not best served by hyper-optimizing for
the most frequent and shallow interests of the largest majorities.  I
think that extreme inclusiveness of all kinds of interests, often at a
small expense to the most common cases was previously a core design
value for the site, but that doesn't really seem to be the case
anymore... just like the main site is still unbrowsable on blackberry
(formally some 14 million page views per day, for those playing the
numbers game) or PS3.