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

[Andrew Gray]

On 4 June 2010 21:21, David Levy <lifeisunfair at gmail.com> wrote:

>> 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.

FWIW, the only time I've heard a complaint about the visual effect of
the interwikis is where we have a very short article on an
internationally popular topic, such as:

http://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaa

...here, 90% of the page "area" is blank space, as the article has
stopped but the interwikis keep on going, and it feels as though the
page is a very weirdly laid-out way of referring people to different
languages.

(This is quite rare on enwiki these days because due to sheer numbers,
it's unusual to find a topic covered in ten or more languages which is
a mere stub on en. But there's still plenty of cases out there.)

Interestingly, even with the full list of languages, the page above
looks better in Vector than in Monobook:

http://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaa?useskin=vector
http://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaa?useskin=monobook

- dropping the "solid boxes" from the left-hand column means that it
doesn't look so dominant when expanded.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk