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

[Michael Peel]

On 2 Jun 2010, at 22:51, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

> A tiny benefit to a hundred
> million people wouldn't justify making wikipedia very hard to use for
> a hundred thousand

Can you justify that the change has now made it very hard for users of those interlanguage links? Given that it's now one click away (click on 'languages' in the sidebar) the first time, and then it stays there afterwards (this menu does stay expanded after the first time it's opened, right?), I wouldn't have thought that would make it very hard.

I would support it being expanded by default, though (even though I rarely use it myself) simply because it's a lot less intuitive to find the language links now, and they're a big part of our mission (as Aryeh and others pointed out). It would also be nice if there were a link along the lines of "can't find the article in your language? start it!" (e.g. red interlanguage links).

As a very general observation: all of the Wikimedia wikis (both different languages and different projects) are essentially islands, with very few non-obvious bridges linking them together, which is a real shame. We need to build better bridges, and encourage people to use them more!

Mike Peel