On Sun, 18 Mar 2012 21:22:03 -0700, jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
Ah, all along the seemingly consistent order of available languages on the bottom of each page depends on hand sorting them in the source of each page.
Pretty much... just like categories.
Let's imagine it is the year 2050 and each article has been translated into each language. A simple misplaced language would e.g., cause ZH users, who are used to looking for their language at the bottom, to not find it.
Also some authors might think, "ZH is the worlds most populous language, it belongs on the top!" So to prevent anarchy consider some standard sort automatically implemented.
Except language sorting is even more chaotic than sorting category names on a multilingual wiki (different languages sort the same set of special letters differently).
What do you sort by? By lang code? But that's a technical bit that has nothing to do with the user. By name in English? But that has nothing to do with the name the user is expecting. By native name? But that's sorting by letters, with multiple scripts, different languages sort things differently, and some don't even have rules for how to sort some characters. Things still end up in places people aren't expecting. And it 'still' isn't a fair way to sort things. By wiki size, activity, link popularity? Now the language system has to start tracking piles of data that isn't even available locally. It has to fetch data from remote wikis and some of that data might not even exist. It's also an immense amount of code. By language we expect the user to want? Sure... but that's only part of the list. And worse our pages our static. We can't go and start varying by Accept-Language causing the cache size Wikipedia takes up to be multiplied by over 100.
OK, enough FUD from me today, bye.
;) Long as you know where you stand.