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

[Mark Williamson]

That's not good enough. First of all, people who don't speak a
language won't recognize the text "see other languages", or even
"languages". Could you pick the word "ენები" out of a page full of
text in a foreign language and understand that clicking it would lead
you to a link to the English version of an article?

The reason your proposal to use geolocation or browser language is not
good enough is that would still result in reducing the visibility of
many, many Wikipedias. I think there are many users who would prefer
to read articles in Catalan whose default browser language is set to
ES, and geolocation will probably not solve that problem either.

I think it is a mistake to hide ANY interwikis. "clutter" is not a
huge sacrifice for people to make to vastly increase INTERNATIONAL
usability.

M.

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 5:59 PM, Howie Fung <hfung at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Per Erik M.'s previous post, we're working on a compromise solution
> whereby we show a list based on user's most likely language(s), probably
> based on browser, and then a "see other languages" link which would
> expand to give all the other langauages.  We're also looking at changing
> the word "Languages" into something that's more descriptive of what the
> links actually do.
>
> I've created the following page for more discussion/proposals on the topic:
>
> http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Opinion:_Language_Links
>
> Howie
>
> On 6/3/10 4:41 PM, David Goodman wrote:
>> It would be nice to actually have a place at the usability wiki to
>> discuss this.
>>
>> My own view is that the actual list of languages was the ideal
>> interface object in   fulfilling many purposes (as discussed in the
>> posts above) and implying multiple levels of understanding without the
>> need for explanation or discussion. For example, that it   varied
>> authomatically from article to article   showed the overall level of
>> progress on the multiple projects.
>>
>> In showing Wikipedia to new users this list was always noticed and
>> proved a very expressive statement.
>>
>> The attitude shown by Trevor's reply speaks for itself in terms of the
>> relationship between the "internal" experts and  the community. I
>> think that it was his wording that induced me to finally post on the
>> issue.
>>
>>
>>> I fixed it (it's a one-line change), but Trevor reverted it:
>>>
>>>> This goes against an intentional design
>>>> decision. To discuss that decision further and submit proposals to change this
>>>> design please contact Howie Fung<hfung at wikimedia.org>  or visit
>>>> http://usability.wikimedia.org
>>>>
>>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>