I'm still a bit leery of country-based selectors, though a good design may work. I've added some notes about autocomplete-based selectors here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Language_Selector_Mobile#Unive...
I have a live mockup: http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/mockups/lang-selector/index...
which does a simple autocomplete search based on language code, local name, or English name transparently. In my ad-hoc testing, most languages I tried for came up within two or three characters of the English name (or English-keyboard-typable local name); this might not be a bad way to go in a lot of places.
A few issues with country-based anything:
* 'spoken in' vs 'widely spoken in', 'native to', etc means that depending where you get your data, you might have a hundred languages listed under 'United States' which won't be much more useful.
* country divisions are political minefields: consider 'region' :) (Taiwan -- country or part of China? Or all of China? Depends who you ask.)
* some languages are not cleanly associated with a country, but sort of muddle around on the borders between them. With small minority languages these can add up, again perhaps clogging the user interface with extra options that we want to expose, but shouldn't be in the way.
* some languages have no territory. Latin? Esperanto? Interlingua? If in a primarily country-based system, then we have to figure out how to shoehorn in extra categories.
-- brion
On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 2:32 AM, Alolita Sharma alolita.sharma@gmail.comwrote:
Arun,
Thanks for posting your latest design proposal on the mobile language selector and working on this at the Pune hackathon.
Look forward to community discussion and feedback.
Alolita
On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 2:28 AM, Arun Ganesh <arun.planemad@gmail.com
wrote:
I have documented the proposal for the language selector on mobile that
was
worked on during the Pune hackathon. The current method of selecting from an unordered list of 250+ languages is not useful or helpful. This may
not
be the best solution but will definitely help for a vast majority of cases. Do give feedback on the talk page:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector_Mobile
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