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

[David Levy]

Aryeh Gregor wrote:

> Users don't explicitly complain about small things.

At the English Wikipedia, this is not so.  If we had a bike shed,
there would be daily complaints about its color.

> They especially don't complain about things like clutter, because the
> negative effect that has is barely perceptible -- extra effort
> required to find things.

I've encountered many complaints about clutter at the English
Wikipedia (pertaining to articles, our main page and other pages), but
not one complaint that the interwiki links caused clutter.

> But if you take away a feature that's important to a small number of
> users, or that's well established and people are used to it, you'll
> get lots of complaints from a tiny minority of users.

I realize that, and I once had a high-profile edit reverted because a
tiny number of users (out of a very large number affected) complained.

However, assuming that the interwiki links benefit a relatively small
percentage of users (still a non-negligible number in absolute terms),
I've yet to see evidence that displaying them by default is
problematic.  Like David Gerard, I desire access to the data behind
this decision.

David Levy