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

[phoebe ayers]

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:10 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Sort of tangentially, ... am I really the only one that frequently
> uses the Wikipedia inter-language links as a big translating
> dictionary?  I've found it to be much more useful than automatic
> translation engines for mathematical terms (both more comprehensive
> but also in that it makes it easy to find the translations for many
> related terms).  The hiding doesn't make this any harder for me, but
> it would make me a lot less likely to discover this useful feature.

Of course not,  I do this all the time (I even wrote about it), but I
don't have any idea how many non-wikipedians use the interwiki links
in this manner. On the list of research projects I wish someone would
get around to: I would love to know more about unexpected/atypical
uses of the projects like this... I guess the reference desk is a
similar feature, an unexpected service cropping up in the middle of
the encyclopedia. I wonder what others there are.

-- phoebe