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

[Joan Goma]

Hiding interlanguage links will worse the effect of Google search on some
small language projects.

See this previous thread:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-January/056671.html


Present situation isn’t much better because intrelanguage links are at the
end of a long list of things on the left side of the screen. It is not clear
what they do, users only see a list of language names.



>From my point of view the “ideal” situation would be:



1)      Hide the interlanguage links.

2)      Guess if the user is multilingual and then highlight links to their
languages. Saying clearly: You also can read this article in xxx and yyy
language.



There are several ways to guest the user languages: 1) Using IP address 2)
History about previously visited language projects from same user or same IP
3) Allowing several languages in user preferences 4) Using
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_negotiation  …





But if we can’t go to the “ideal “situation I think that for small language
projects it is better left things as they are than hiding interlanguage
links.