Talk:Universal Language Selector/Compact Language Links

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Wikipedia as seen from Norwegian ip-adresses

2 comments • 20:04, 23 August 2016 6 days ago

2

Dyveldi (talkcontribs)

Wikipedia as seen from Norwegian ip-adresses

There is a lot we do not know about Wikipedia editors and readers. One thing we do know is that one of the larger user groups is students. So what does Wikipedia offer students and academics working from Norwegian ip-adresses?

I have quite unofficially done a small piece of original research. I have visited two of the largest educational institutions in Norway logged on and taken a good look at the selection of languages offered to Norwegian students and academics. I visited Norways biggest and oldest university (UiO se article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oslo). It has around 27 000 studentes and 6000 employees. I also visited Høgskolen i Oslo og Akershus (HiOA, see article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_and_Akershus_University_College ) with more than 17 000 studentes and 1 700 employees.

In addition I visited Norways main library (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Library_of_Norway ) and supplemented my findings from one of their PCs.

I looked at the Main page, first from Norwegian bokmål, clicked on to Norwegian nyorsk and went on to Danish. All of which have turned DLL on. I logged which languages Wikipedia has to offer for a Norwegian student or academic reading from any of these institutions.

After looking at the Main page I looked at Tinget (English counterpart Wikipedia:Village pump), bokmål and nynorsk and Danish. Went on to « Edvard Munch », looked at the same three languages and on to « Norge » (Norway), « Zanzibar» and last but not least looked at « Botswana ».

The selection at UiO and HiOA was identical. Interestingly the selection as viewed from our national library was slightly different. It was also somewhat astonishing that the main page existed in eighter 22, or 33 or 292 languages depending on which wikipedia I visited.

MAINPAGE - Norwegian bokmål

Offers me the following language list

· Norsk nynorsk

· Deutsch

· English

· Espanol

· Francais

· Portugues

· ru

· samegiella

· zh

· + 13 more

MAINPAGE - Norwegian nynorsk

Offers me the following language list

· Norsk bokmål

· Svenska

· Dansk

· English

· Samegiella

· ar

· ur

· hi

· zh

· + 24 more

MAINPAGE - Danish

· ar

· Cebuano

· English

· hi

· ja

· Norsk nynorsk

· Samegiella

· Winaray

· zh

· +283 mer

Working from The National Library of Norway I get a slightly different choice: I lose hi. but gain norsk bokmål.

****************

TINGET- bokmål

· ar

· English

· Espanol

· hi.

· Norsk nynorsk

· ru

· Samegiella

· ur

· zh

· + 201 flere

TINGET- nynorsk

· Norsk bokmål

· svenska

· Dansk

· English

· Espanol

· .hi

· samegiella

· .ur

· .zh

· + 206 til

TINGET- dansk

· .ar

· English

· Espanol

· .hi

· norsk nynors

· ru

· samegiella

· .ur

· .zh

· + 201 mer

Working from The National Library of Norway I get a slightly different choice: Russian is replaced with Norsk bokmål.

**************

EDVARD MUNCH - bokmål

· .ar

· English

· Espanol

· .hi

· bahasa ingonesia

· norsk nynorsk

· ru

· samegiella

· .zh

· +74 flere

EDVARD MUNCH - nynorsk

· Norsk bokmål

· svenska

· dansk

· .ar

· English

· Espanol

· .hi

· samegiella

· .zh

· +74 mer

EDVARD MUNCH fra dansk

· .ar

· English

· Espanol

· .hi

· bahasa Indonesia

· norsk nynorsk

· russisk

· samegiella

· .zh

· +74 mer

Working from The National Library of Norway I get a slightly different choice as Bahasa Indonesia is replaced with norsk bokmål.

************

NORGE - bokmål

· afrikaans

· .AR

· dansk

· føroyskt

· hrvatski

· norsk nynorsk

· samegiella

· Suomi

· svenska

· +248 flere

Working from The National Library of Norway I get a slightly different choice as hrvatski is replacedwith english.

NORGE -nynorsk

· norsk bokmål

· svenska

· dansk

· afrikaans

· .ar

· føroyskt

· hrvatski

· samegiella

· Suomi

· +248 til

Working from The National Library of Norway I get a slightly different choice as Suomi (Finnish) is replaced with English

NORGE - dansk

· Afrikaans

· .ar

· Suomi

· føroyskt

· hrvatski

· norsk nynorsk

· norsk bokmål

· samegeilla

· svenska

· +248 mer

Working from The National Library of Norway I get a slightly different choice as Swedish is replaced with English.

**********

ZANZIBAR bokmål

· .ar

· English

· Espanol

· .hi

· bahasa Indonesia

· norsk nynorsk

· ru

· .ur

· .zh

· +76 flere

ZANZIBAR nynorsk

· norsk bokmål

· svenska

· dansk

· .ar

· English

· Espanol

· .hi

· .ur

· .zh

· +76 til

ZANZIBAR dansk

· .ar

· English

· Espanol

· .hi

· bahasa Indonesia

· norsk nynorsk

· ru

· .ur

· .zh

· +76 mer

Working from The National Library of Norway I get a slightly different choice as Bahasa Indonesia is replaced with Norwegian bokmål.

**************

BOTSWANA bokmål

· Dansk

· .mk

· norsk nynorsk

· ru

· samegiella

· setswana

· Suomi

· svenska

· .zh

· +201 flere

Working from The National Library of Norway I get a slightly different choice as Chinese is replaced with English.

BOTSWANA nynorsk

· norsk bokmål

· svenska

· dansk

· .mk

· ru

· samegiella

· setswana

· Suomi

· .zh

· +201 til

Working from The National Library of Norway I get a slightly different choice as Chinese is replaced with English

BOTSWANA dansk

· English

· Suomi

· mk

· norsk nynorsk

· ru

· samegiella

· svenska

· setswana

· zh.

· +201 mere

Working from The National Library of Norway I get a slightly different choice as Chinese is repalaced with Norwegian bokmål.

My question is how on Earth has DLL figured out that this should be the prefered language lists for Norwegian students and Academics? Why is this considered a useful list working from Norway?

Reply 19:40, 23 August 2016 6 days ago

Dyveldi (talkcontribs)

And if anybody wonders what DLLs choice of languages for Dyveldi is it was arabisk, english, espanol, hindi, norsk nynorsk, samegiella, svenska, urdu og kinesisk on July 19th and so it still is today. It is most certainly not representative of the languages I have visited or have the remotest connection with which languages I am interested in, read or write. Regards, although not so very respectfully, Dyveldi

Reply 20:04, 23 August 2016 6 days ago

Reply to "Wikipedia as seen from Norwegian ip-adresses"

WP for Norwegian bokmål has voted against

One comment • 18:43, 23 August 2016 6 days ago

1

Dyveldi (talkcontribs)

Answer to the vote on Norwegian bokmål was the users being against this change and we want it rolled back. We want the "old" alphabetical language list for all users that are not logged on. We want the personal preferences of all registered users changed back to turned off. Everybody who want this option should be free to turn it on and everybody else should not be forced to turn it off.

The complete discussion and the vote as it was of 23. August 2016 in Norwegian can be found here: https://no.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Tinget&oldid=16610928

Summary of the vote in English:

-- This change was introduced without anyone asking what the editors on Wikipedia in Norwegian bokmål wanted. The change resulted in all users on Norwegian bokmål had their preferences changed and if anyone reads Wikipedia in Norwegian bokmål not-logged-in they were shown a changed and reduced visible liste of languages.

-- The change was implemented while most of Norway had their summer holidays. The discussion has been in the most common holiday period and the week after and this would normally result in a not very high participation in votes and discussions.

-- The discussion has become long and complex with a lot of sub themes which also often results in fewer and fewer active participants. The discussion contains a lot of text, when a reader turns his og her attention to the discussion it is not always clear what is new since the reader last read the discussion and in addition it can be unclear what the purpose with some of the sub themes. Some independent discussions have also been posted in week 29 and 20. All this influences the amount of participators and their participation.

-- There is also a separate discussion on this page belonging to the project.

-- 28 registered users have participated in the discussion and in addition some unregistered users (ip-adresses). 14 users chose to use the option to voice their opinion in form of a vote.

-- 13 users voted for the DLL change to be rolled back (1 user was strictly speaking half an hour late and I am uncertain if this has to do with a local time or if the user really was late). 1 user has voted to keep the change. Looking at the remaining participants who did not vote does not change the fact that a majority is against the change. Of the remaining 15 who have written about their opinion in the discussion 7 have as far as I can see been very critical or clearly said that they wanted it turned off, 4 have been positive and 4 have been critical albeit not as clearly as the previously mentioned 7. No ip-adresses have voted but 8 different ip-s have been very negative to this change. It is not possible to ascertain how many persons these ip-s represent.

-- Jeblad has chosen not to use the possibility to vote. He has contributed with over 30% of the posts in the discussion and is interpreted as positive to keep this change. Jeblad has also posted 5 Phabricator-discussions. This is a lot of contributions and a very high activity, but he is counted as one user conclusively positive to the change.

-- The discussion has also led to several users finding out how to change their personal preferences, but how many who have turned this off is not known. Some users have made an active choose and kept it. This is however not possible to turn off for users reading not-logged-in.

-- Altogether 20 of the 28 participants in the discussion do not want this change. 4 users are critical of the system. 4 of the 28 participants are positive.

-- This is a solid majority whichever way this discussion and/or vote is summarized. I can't but conclude that the majority is lage enough to warrant the change being rolled back to the way it was. Users who want it can turn it on of their own volition, not-logged-in users get the complete alphabetical list back.

-- Please listen to our wish and roll the change bak to being voluntary to turn on. Regards from user Dyveldi.

Reply 18:43, 23 August 2016 6 days ago

Reply to "WP for Norwegian bokmål has voted against"

This still sucks.

5 comments • 23:38, 18 August 2016 10 days ago

5

Epiq (talkcontribs)

I guess I will continue complaining about this, as I did here (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T136677 – not sure if it was the right place) and repeat my comments.

This feature is annoyingly complicated. Please make the list more simple, and get rid of the pop-up window. A similar approach that has been taken for the mobile version would be good. I don't understand the need for this kind of complexity. For example, compare a situation of a typical article with 17 interwiki links in the English wiki and the Finnish one: which list is more complicated to navigate, the English one with 17 languages – or the Finnish one with a separate scrollable pop-up window, five different categories and two columns of text!?

Hiding the interwiki links like this actually causes me a lot of extra trouble instead of helping me. I am interested in a fairly wide array of languages, as well as seeing, which languages are available for a given topic. For example, on the Finnish Wikipedia page on Philippe Buonarroti (https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Buonarroti), nine interwiki links are shown and seven are hidden. I have to open a pop-up window to know which languages they are. Instead of showing me a list of those previously hidden languages, I have a long list of all the available languages grouped into eight (!) different categories, some geographical and some not, with some languages repeated (e.g. Russian is on the list three times, and English a full eight!). If I was searching for Hungarian, for instance, I would have no way of knowing whether it actually exists, and I would have to browse through a long and confusingly, unintuitively arranged list to actually know that yes, there is a Hungarian article available on the topic (if I ever made it that far). This feels outright discriminatory in some ways.

It seems to be a larger trend to only show users content that a service presumes that they would be interested in. I'm sure that this is often terribly useful, although sometimes problematic (as in the case of Google algorithms that leave out certain search results and bring up others, for example). Here, however, that is currently executed in a way that I find quite annoying. Using a simple, alphabetised list in which what you see is all there is can in many situations actually be easier, more equal, neutral and helpful. Browsing different languages and moving between them, which I like to do a lot, becomes much more difficult with this kind of an arrangement. Now, this does not preclude lifting up some languages to the top of the list, for example (like has been done with the mobile version), but the current version is IMHO a complete mess.

Reply 21:56, 9 August 2016 19 days ago

Pginer-WMF (talkcontribs)

Thanks for your feedback @Epiq. I'll try to cover the different topics mentioned below:

Language grouping

You provided a good example that illustrates the need for some improvements in this area. The grouping by region has proven to be helpful when there are many languages available (e.g., articles such as Moon available in ~200 languages, or in tools such as Content Translation where it has been used to select among all existing languages to translate to/from).

However, for pages available in fewer languages, grouping by region may add some unnecessary complexity. It makes sense to avoid the grouping in those cases, and this is something we plan to work on. More details are available in this ticket.

Using a separate panel to access more languages

Regarding the use of a separate panel for language selection, we considered that it (a) allowed the user to focus on their languages of interest (the initially visible provides enough room to include the number of languages most of our uses speak), and (b) it allowed us to provide advanced searching capabilities to facilitate the selection. Searching was the most common method for users to find their language during our research, and providing flexible search (you can search for a language based on the name in another languages, making typos or using the ISO codes) made it easier to support the cases where the language you are looking for was not in the initial list.

Although the tool does not show initially all the interlanguage links, the access to them is provided through a "continuation" pattern where it is quite clear how to access to the rest of the languages. Our research confirmed that users were able to figure out how to find their language when it was not present in the initial list (something that they only need to do once at most). We are monitoring the volume of inter-language navigations to identify any potential issues.

Advanced usecases

Our main usecase we optimised the tool for is for multilingual users to quickly navigate across the languages they know (to read/edit the content). With the previous model, a user speaking several languages was forced to search their languages again and again on lists of very different length. Every single time. This is especially harming for small languages (in which few articles are available, but those available are also available in many others), since users often do this effort in vain which demotivates users to check if content is available in their language.

With the Compact Language links, once the user selected their languages once, they become extremely visible later, making it easy to navigate to them and inviting to do so. We think this significantly improves the experience of many multilingual readers and editors.

Having said that, we know there are many other usecases, and we'd like to explore how to better support them. In order to do so, we need a deep understanding of the activities those involve. You said you are interested in a wide array of languages, would you be able to describe the use you do of them in more detail? Are the listing of language links in Wikidata a reasonable mechanism to support those?

Keeping users in control

I don't think Compact language links could be described as part of the trend of "only show users content that a service presumes that they would be interested in". Human intervention is given priority in the languages shown more prominently to the user:

Individual users can decide their preferred languages by selecting them. Previous choices is the criteria with a highest priority (since it is based on actual decisions by the user), it will not be overridden by other guesses.
Browser accept languages are also considered. The user can configure those through the browser settings.
Communities can define their list of closely related languages that will be taken into account to surface those, when there are no previous selections.
Finally, other criteria such as location-related guesses are based on CLDR, an information repository open for contribution.

More details about how are languages selected are available here.

Reply 11:44, 12 August 2016 17 days ago

Epiq (talkcontribs)

Hi Pginer-WMF, thank you for your reply.

Language grouping

This might really be the biggest problem of the feature. I do understand the need to get a more usable interface for articles with dozens or hundreds of interwiki links, as an alphabetical list gets terribly long and hard to navigate. However, this subset of articles is relatively small for big wikis – the vast majority of articles must have from a few to a few dozen iw links. Instead of starting with the cases that are actually problematic and easy to improve, you adopted an unnecessarily complicated approach for situations that are working just fine. Apparently you have done research here (?), but as you see in the ticket you refecenced above, the result is just ridiculously complex. I do not understand why you could not have taken a safer approach from the start and just see first how this feature is actually working for the difficult cases (say over 50 links) before making many more people suffer using it.

Using a separate panel to access more languages

"[A]llowed the user to focus on their languages of interest (the initially visible provides enough room to include the number of languages most of our uses speak)" – so basically prioritizing large languages on the expense of smaller ones, because they are searched less?

"[I]t allowed us to provide advanced searching capabilities to facilitate the selection" – so does the mobile version, the design of which is much superior to this one. Why can't you just include a simple search box above the list of links? It works great in the mobile version!

Advanced usecases

"With the previous model, a user speaking several languages was forced to search their languages again and again on lists of very different length. Every single time." That is true, and the reason why the mobile version with a few links lifted above the list coupled with a search feature works well. Having to use a confusingly subcatecorized pop-up window does not in my opinion make the situation better overall. I am a user speaking several languages who has had to search for his languages on different length lists for years and years, and this is still hugely more annoying to use.

"With the Compact Language links, once the user selected their languages once, they become extremely visible later, making it easy to navigate to them and inviting to do so." I have not disputed this (and as I said I think it works great in the mobile version), I only have a problem with the execution of the feature. However, I must point out that this is actually not working for me at all when I'm not logged in (browser history/cookies are cleared, IP changes), which is most of the time when I check Wikipedia on the computer. I just see a random and/or geographical selection of languages which is even less useful for me since I live in a country where my native language is not spoken.

"You said you are interested in a wide array of languages, would you be able to describe the use you do of them in more detail? Are the listing of language links in Wikidata a reasonable mechanism to support those?" I'm not sure what you are referring to with the Wikidata list – it's just a regular alphabetical list? I meant that I don't check just, say, Spanish every single time; if I'm reading an article on something Czech, maybe I'll check the Czech article, if Danish, the Danish article, or even all or most of the interwikis if I'm writing on something, or translations of a term by just hovering over the link, etc. etc. I'm wondering if you actually use the iw links much in spite of making changes to them...?

Anyway, I now managed to hide this whole thing globally, so out of sight and out of mind, I guess...

Reply 10:50, 13 August 2016 16 days ago

Pginer-WMF (talkcontribs)

"[A]llowed the user to focus on their languages of interest (the initially visible provides enough room to include the number of languages most of our uses speak)" – so basically prioritizing large languages on the expense of smaller ones, because they are searched less?

No. I was referring that we are showing up to 9 languages in the main list and most users consume content on less than 9 languages. so over time, as users access content in their languages of interest (bigger or smaller), those will be right at hand to easily switch to them back and forth with no additional searching effort.

"[I]t allowed us to provide advanced searching capabilities to facilitate the selection" – so does the mobile version, the design of which is much superior to this one. Why can't you just include a simple search box above the list of links? It works great in the mobile version!

I'm not sure I understand the comparison with the mobile version. On mobile the list of languages are in a separate view. On the article you just have a button (similar to the "X more" Compact Language links provide) that leads to a separate view for the language lists. I wonder what makes you consider this transition not to be a problem on mobile and a similar one that keeps more context on desktop (not navigating away) represents a problem.

Reply 07:36, 15 August 2016 14 days ago

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

@Epiq, have you been using the search feature? I don't try to read through the list of grouped languages. When I reach a page such as w:fi:Suur-Zimbabwe, I don't usually even look at the list. I click the "32 more" button and immediately start typing the name or language code that I want. I find my target language very quickly this way.

Reply 23:38, 18 August 2016 10 days ago

Reply to "This still sucks."

Editing the default languages

7 comments • 21:59, 13 August 2016 15 days ago

7

NaBUru38 (talkcontribs)

Hello, here it says says that "main factor for choosing the languages are the previous language selections from the user". However, I tried to click my favourite Western European languages, but the list keeps having Indonesian and Urdu. Is there any options menu?

Reply 17:11, 21 July 2016 1 month ago

Amire80 (talkcontribs)

Can you please tell me:

In which Wikipedia did you try to do it?
Which languages did you click?
On which articles did you try it?

Thanks!

Reply 19:00, 21 July 2016 1 month ago

NaBUru38 (talkcontribs)

Hello, I tried it in Spanish Wikipedia. I clicked Western European languages like Portuguese, Italian, French, English, German, Dutch and Swedish. I tried it on about five different articles.

Reply 15:49, 23 July 2016 1 month ago

NaBUru38 (talkcontribs)

I just opened twenty articles of countries and opened the search bar to open the article on those languages. I still get Urdu, Hindi and Arabic.

Reply 16:02, 23 July 2016 1 month ago

Frenezulo (talkcontribs)

From the Spanish Wikipedia, article "Jane Austen", I opened the menu and clicked the link for Aymara. It went to the Aymara Wikipedia, as it should. But the link for Azerbaijani (which I had selected earlier from another Wikipedia, for the same article) does not appear. Does that mean I have to select every language I want to see from every Wikipedia where I might want to see it? From the Esperanto Wikipedia homepage, I don't see links to From the Spanish Wikipedia article "John Denver", the link for French doesn't appear under "Africa", where it should, since English and Portugese both appear there. Is there a way to edit the list of languages I'd like included in my short menu directly?

Reply 10:43, 12 August 2016 17 days ago

Frenezulo (talkcontribs)

I've found the answers to some of my questions from other comments on this page. The issue about French not appearing under the Africa heading remains.

Reply 10:46, 12 August 2016 17 days ago

NaBUru38 (talkcontribs)

Now I get Afrikaans, Arabic, Nahuatl and Latvian, instead of French, Italian and Portuguese as I clicked several times.

Reply 21:59, 13 August 2016 15 days ago

Reply to "Editing the default languages"

Comparison

2 comments • 11:49, 12 August 2016 17 days ago

2

85.64.172.205 (talkcontribs)

It makes it more difficult to compare the names of entries in different languages - instead of just putting the cursor over the languages for comparison.

Reply 14:54, 29 July 2016 1 month ago

Pginer-WMF (talkcontribs)

The tool was mainly focused on facilitating the navigation across the set of languages users speak.

The listing of language links in Wikidata may be a good place for viewing the name of a topic in all languages.

Having more details on the specific usecase, would be helpful to understand how to better support it. Are you interested in looking the name of the article on a given language (to get the translation)? Comparing the lengths of the titles in different languages? Verifying they meet some rules?

thanks

Reply 11:49, 12 August 2016 17 days ago

Reply to "Comparison"

Inspect Babel Options

2 comments • 18:18, 11 August 2016 18 days ago

2

Mathelerner (talkcontribs)

The language knowledge declaration via the Babel Template / Parser Function should be inspected too (if present). There, many Wikipedians offer the languages they know in a machine-readable format.

Reply 19:04, 31 July 2016 29 days ago

Pginer-WMF (talkcontribs)

Thanks for the feedback @Mathelerner. Babel templates are a good source of information to consider since the user explicitly selected those. There is a ticket to support the idea where this can be tracked.

Reply 18:18, 11 August 2016 18 days ago

Reply to "Inspect Babel Options"

Another Google Inc.?

4 comments • 23:50, 10 August 2016 18 days ago

4

Abiyoyo (talkcontribs)

For a long time Wikipedia was great because the community decided what content to show on a web-site. Not that "smart" google/facebookk-style algorythms that decide what a user wil see, but people, devoted to NPOV, full and free data. Now we are shifting towards digital slavery, spying for my geolocation and suggesting me something i do not want. Not the full & NPOV-content, but something prejudged.

Reply Edited 22:37, 28 July 2016 1 month ago

SSneg (talkcontribs)

The notion that "before Google, The Internet was fair" is wrong. Whenever humans are confronted with a mass of information too large to process at a glance, they devise concepts and algorithms to tame that mass and make it human-processable. These algorithms are designed by humans to specifically distort "the original information" and carry a bit of subjectivity to them. The aim of Wikipedia cannot be "lets just dump all the information at a reader (like 200-language list)" but "lets present the most relevant information using algorithms that are WELL-INTENDED (as opposed e.g. to profit-optimized algorithms of Facebook)".

Reply 10:47, 1 August 2016 28 days ago

Pginer-WMF (talkcontribs)

@Abiyoyo, your comment seems to imply that Compact Language links is only driven algorithmically without user or community intervention. However, human intervention is given priority in the languages shown more prominently to the user:

Individual users can decide their preferred languages by selecting them. That is, a user navigating between Hindi and Punjabi, will have those two languages available in the short list. Previous choices is the criteria with a highest priority (since it is based on actual decisions by the user), it will not be overridden by other guesses.
Browser accept languages are also considered. The user can configure those through the browser settings.
Communities can define their list of closely related languages that will be taken into account to surface those, when there are no previous selections.
Finally, other criteria such as location-related guesses are based on CLDR, an information repository open for contribution.

More details here.

Reply 17:52, 10 August 2016 19 days ago

Abiyoyo (talkcontribs)

Thank you, Pginer-WMF, Now i think my comment was a kind of overreacting and too harsh. Sorry for that. The future possibility to change the default interwiki lists for communities (T138973) is a kind of a solution. The other reason behind my comment was also the invisibility of "show other languages" button, which was broken due to css conflict in ru-wiki. The first impression was that other interwiki links were hidden completely. Now it is obvious that it was problem on local ru-wiki side.

Reply Edited 23:50, 10 August 2016 18 days ago

Reply to "Another Google Inc.?"

Language discrimination

55 comments • 11:44, 9 August 2016 20 days ago

55

Gamliel Fishkin (talkcontribs)

It is not a feature, it is a bug! It discriminates against many languages. These are languages with not many speakers (tens of languages in Russia, hundreds of languages in Africa, etc.), and also languages whose most speakers are not familiar with computers and Internet. For example, I know that the Saam language exists thank to links to Wikipedia in it. But the new bug will hide links to articles in "small" languages, and Wikipedia readers will think that those languages do not exist. So, please do not enable this bug and no more develop it!

Reply Edited 13:16, 8 July 2016 1 month ago

DidiWeidmann (talkcontribs)

Dear Gamlie Fishkin I can strongly support what you say: The new policy is a big discrimination of small languages and is completely unacceptable it is against the principles of human rights and lacks of respect of small cultures! ~~~~

Reply 13:46, 4 August 2016 25 days ago

Amire80 (talkcontribs)

This feature will make these languages more prominent. Now languages of Russia, such as Tatar, Bashkir and Udmurt, will be shown prominently to people who connect from Russia. Earlier, you had to look for them in a list of more than 100 languages. Same for Saami—it will be shown prominently to people who connect from Norway or Finland.

Reply 14:01, 8 July 2016 1 month ago

DidiWeidmann (talkcontribs)

It gives the impression that this new feature is especially and expressly designed with the intention to discriminate several languages like Esperanto or Yiddish! There was now real need for such a system – I ask to restore the old System!

Reply 14:36, 4 August 2016 25 days ago

Gamliel Fishkin (talkcontribs)

So, human beings outside of Russia will think that the Tatar language does not exist, etc. It is just a discrimination. As a final result of such a discrimination, almost any human being in the world will think, that there in the world only two languages do exist: his or her native language and English.

Reply Edited 14:36, 8 July 2016 1 month ago

Amire80 (talkcontribs)

The user interface shows a list of languages that is customized for every user and helps people find information in their language. In articles with a lot of languages the list will have nine languages, and not two, and there will a button that says "X more languages", where X is the number.

Reply 15:08, 8 July 2016 1 month ago

Holder (talkcontribs)

For me this feature also looks like a discrimination of especially small languages. It does not help people to find information in their language, it helps people to find information just in big dominating languages!

Reply 11:46, 11 July 2016 1 month ago

Amire80 (talkcontribs)

Hi @Holder,

Thanks a lot for your comment.

As I explained above, this feature doesn't discriminate minor languages, but actually helps them by showing them more prominently to users that are most likely to know them.

I noticed on your user page that you are writing in the Alemannic Wikipedia. I checked the CLDR territory-language information table, and this language is supposed to be shown prominently to people who are connecting from France, Liechtenstein and Switzerland (search that table for "gsw"). At the moment, however, there is a particular bug for this language because of which it is not actually shown. I filed this as a task with high priority, and it will be fixed very soon. Once it's fixed, it will be shown prominently to everybody who is connecting from these countries.

Reply 15:13, 11 July 2016 1 month ago

Holder (talkcontribs)

@Amire80, that's indeed interesting news, thank you very much.

This long known problem is much more complicated: Alemannic language (and therefore also Alemannic Wikipedia) covers gsw, swg, wae and gct. That's why it hasn't been solved over the last ten years.

How will this be fixed in this case? It would be nice if als:wp would also be shown for readers in Germany where Alemannic is also be spoken by about five million people.

Reply 09:57, 12 July 2016 1 month ago

Amire80 (talkcontribs)

Hi,

The data that we use can be found at http://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/29/supplemental/territory_language_information.html

I can see that swg is listed in Germany and wae is listed under Liechtenstein and Switzerland. gct is not listed anywhere, but you can ask to add it by clicking "add new" under the relevant country and supplying information about the number of speakers of this language in that country.

Technically, we can probably redirect all these codes to als, but I'll have to discuss it with the team. I added a comment at the bug report: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T139949

Reply 10:24, 12 July 2016 1 month ago

C933103 (talkcontribs)

It rely on CLDR and CLDR rely on some official figures, so if a country refuse to recognize a language is spoken in it then the data could be slewed. Different country also have different standard of what language being spoken there are common enough to be listed in it, for instance some languages spoken by only 0.x% population are listed for some countries while they are not in some other regions.

Reply 19:26, 12 July 2016 1 month ago

Amire80 (talkcontribs)

From my experience, CLDR is fairly flexible with sources, and they listen to people who send reasonable bugs. If you have data that a language is spoken by a certain number of people, I encourage you to submit a bug there.

Reply 19:39, 12 July 2016 1 month ago

C933103 (talkcontribs)

And so we need people with enough knowledge in individual country's situation and are willing to put effort into searching for non biased info about language usage situation and also understanding that some languages that are traditionally not considered as language otself is actually a language, and the person must also be neutral enough in term of the matter to avoid intentional overlooking some languages and must also be willing to spend time to report the problem to CLDR.

Reply 23:44, 12 July 2016 1 month ago

Gamliel Fishkin (talkcontribs)

Firstly, some human beings speaking the Alemannic language can live outside of the countries where most its speakers live. Secondly, as a result of this universal language selector, human beings outside of these countries will not know that the Alemannic language exists.

It was in some of the first years of the twentieth century in the Russian Empire. Some day, one little Russian girl seen a nameplate in Yiddish or Hebrew on the door of some Jewish family. She was not Jewish, just Russian, but these letters interested her, she learned much and became a Soviet semitologist. Similarly, someone can be interested in a language of another nation thanks to seeing language's name in the interwikis; but that universal language selector destroys such a chance.

Reply 23:14, 11 July 2016 1 month ago

Amire80 (talkcontribs)

@Gamliel Fishkin, I understand, but there is also another possibility: That somebody who lives in Russia and thinks that there is no Wikipedia in the Tatar language, will find out that there is one. Compact Language Links make this more likely.

Reply 09:17, 12 July 2016 1 month ago

C933103 (talkcontribs)

@Amire80 When most major languages are displayed outside the panel, the need to find interlanguage link from the panel would be minimized. This reduce the chance for user to discover discover what they might want, if they don't know such a Wikipedia exist before. Even in a huge list, users would have a higher chance to discover their familiar small language than such a large list because users would be more familiar with language names written in their native script and native language, but if they never click into the panel then the chance for them to discover their language Wikipedia become 0

Reply 19:38, 12 July 2016 1 month ago

Amire80 (talkcontribs)

The languages are tailored for each user, and they are not necessarily major. A minor language of the user's country will be preferred to a major language spoken outside of the user's country.

Reply 19:46, 12 July 2016 1 month ago

C933103 (talkcontribs)

In countries like Russia, India or China, there are far more than 10 languages spoken in those countries and inevitably native language of some users can only be found in the expanded panel.

Reply 20:03, 12 July 2016 1 month ago

Amire80 (talkcontribs)

This is indeed an issue: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T133029

There's no easy solution for it, but we'll definitely get there.

Reply 20:07, 12 July 2016 1 month ago

Gamliel Fishkin (talkcontribs)

The only solution for such an issue is to turn this "feature" off and forget it.

Reply 20:16, 12 July 2016 1 month ago

C933103 (talkcontribs)

Even if you enable subregion-based filtering, there are always regions like Moscow or Shanghai where every community in the country would have people going to there for economic reason and result in more than 10 languages spoken in the same subregion.

Reply 21:21, 12 July 2016 1 month ago

Jørgen (talkcontribs)

I can see great possibilities in this feature - if it is changed a little bit. It is impossible to get all people satisfied with a uniform solution. Let the user decide! Have a list in 'preferences' where you can tick all the languages you want shown, and a button below to show the full list. As a dane, I see english, spanish and german, but need french, swedish and norwegian too. I have arabic, urdu, chinese and hindi. These languages are probably spoken by some immigrated inhabitants of my country, but useless to the vast majority. Føroysk and kalaalisut are languages from the north atlantic former possesions. I have no idea what to do with them, most danes cannot understand them, let alone write these languages.

Reply 07:52, 15 July 2016 1 month ago

Holder (talkcontribs)

@Jørgen, the problem is that there has to be a decision what is shown to readers.

Reply 07:59, 15 July 2016 1 month ago

Jørgen (talkcontribs)

yes, let the readers decide themselves by ticking a list. And for Ip-readers, let the list be default 'all' as it used to be.

Reply 08:01, 15 July 2016 1 month ago

Amire80 (talkcontribs)

You can pre-select the languages according to instructions at Universal Language Selector/Compact Language Links.

Also, every language that you select simply by clicking is remembered, so this feature adapts itself to every user (including anonymous readers).

Reply Edited 09:14, 15 July 2016 1 month ago

Madglad (talkcontribs)

Agree with Jørgen. The list is unusable, because it shows "big languages", of which many, nobody in a far away region understand (like Indonesian languages in Denmark, on the other side of the planet). It does not show the languages in the neighbourghing countries, that most people understand. Note also, that most users are not registered and cannot change their settings.

Reply 08:30, 15 July 2016 1 month ago

Amire80 (talkcontribs)

Hi @Madglad,

Are you connecting from Denmark? May I ask on which article do you see Indonesian?

Reply 09:12, 15 July 2016 1 month ago

Madglad (talkcontribs)

I saw Indonesian on several articles as far as I remember. Logged in from Denmark, and visiting da-wiki. But the languages are changing, depending on how I search around. But on another clean browser (tor) and logged out, I see

(still visiting da-wiki). This list of languages is not a good starting default value for Danish language speakers. It should be assumed that most people visiting da-wiki also know the other neighbourghing languages, and that almost no Danish speakers understand Indonesian and Indian languages. The algorithm shouldn't try to guess known languages, but should pick them from a list when visiting a language-specifik Wikipedia. Connecting to da-wiki from Australia, it should be considered more likely that the user understands Norwegian, than some aboriginal language. I don't understand why things like these are rolled out without previous discussion i the wikipedias.

Reply 10:59, 15 July 2016 1 month ago

Amire80 (talkcontribs)

In a usual working scenario, your previously selected languages are supposed to be remembered. If you are using Tor or other anonymizers or proxies, the system cannot know anything about you, so it is showing the biggest global languages, and Indonesian happens to be one of them. If you are using a private browser window, you also won't see any of your previous selections

You can configure your own preferred languages in the browser according to the instructions in Universal Language Selector/Compact Language Links.

Configuring preferred languages per specific project, as you suggest, will be possible very soon. See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T138973 .

Reply 11:37, 15 July 2016 1 month ago

Madglad (talkcontribs)

What is "a usual working scenario"?

I guess a typical scenario is a not logged in user, visiting one of the versions of Wikpedia, possibly not English. The IP is placed somewhere on the planet in region where the Indonesian languages etc. are not known, but the languages in the region are.

Quote: "Configuring preferred languages per specific project ... will be possible" - this gives me the impression, that this change is designed for en-wiki, and is not ready for implementation in the other wikipedias yet. Roll it out when it is developed and tested. Roll back for now.

Reply 08:36, 16 July 2016 1 month ago

Höyhens (talkcontribs)

Yes. This is a change that should not to be done.

Reply Edited 09:17, 15 July 2016 1 month ago

Gamliel Fishkin (talkcontribs)

There is one more topic. I see no problem if the system uses IP-address and other current information about an unregistered visitor. But if the system not only uses current information, but also remembers pages visited by this human being, it is a privacy gap.

Reply 14:09, 15 July 2016 1 month ago

Amire80 (talkcontribs)

No, the Compact Language Links feature doesn't remember this information.

Reply 15:15, 15 July 2016 1 month ago

Madglad (talkcontribs)

If a user visits the Danish language Wikipedia from a Danish IP address it will be reasonable to assume that interesting language versions to the person would be:

*sv=Swedish (neighbour country, mutually intelligible with Danish)

*no=Norwegian Bokmål (neighbour country, mutually intelligible with Danish)

*nn=Norwegian Nynorsk (neighbour country, mutually intelligible with Danish)

*de=German (minority language in part of Denmark, neighbour country, language taught in in Danish schools)

*en=English (language taught in in Danish schools)

Languages spoken in overseas countries of The Danish Realm:

*fo=Faroese

*kl=Kalaallisut

Languages taught in some schools:

*fr=French

*es=Spanish

Now, this example focused on Danish (and Denmark proper) can probably be generalised to most languages; languages, which have no contact with Indian, Indonesian, Chinese languages, but have contact with a lot of neighbour languages.

Reply 17:09, 15 July 2016 1 month ago

Amire80 (talkcontribs)

If the IP is identified as Denmark, then German, Faroese and Kalaallisut are supposed to be shown in the initial list (if, of course, a corresponding article in these languages is available).

Your IP probably wasn't identified as Denmark, which is quite possible if you used something like Tor, so the world's largest languages were shown.

If you don't see a language that interests you in the initial list, you can click "X more" and select the language that you need, and the next time it will be shown in the short list.

I know that Danish is similar to Norwegian and Swedish, but do you have data about the number of people in Denmark who are actually reading in these languages?

Reply 17:42, 15 July 2016 1 month ago

C933103 (talkcontribs)

IIRC wikipedia have its data about percentage of visit per language version per country? It should be possible to use the data in reverse to find out percentage of visit on specific language version in a specific country or subregion.
You can also check the mediawiki language fallback tree?

Reply 20:44, 15 July 2016 1 month ago

Madglad (talkcontribs)

Many times more read Swedish and Norwegian, than distant languages like Chinese. Especially if the article is better than the Danish one. Exact numbers unknown, but almost nobody in Denmark is able to read Chinese, almost everybody is able to read Swedish.

But I think Danish/Denmark is just an example, the problem is general for language-wikipedias. The solution is usable for en-wiki, not for the Wikipedias of other languages, and should not be implemented in these, in the current form.

Reply 20:03, 15 July 2016 1 month ago

Höyhens (talkcontribs)

I must admit to be extremely worried and sad for this attack against Wikipedia as a free dictionary. Cancel it as soon as possible, please.

Reply 17:18, 15 July 2016 1 month ago

Madglad (talkcontribs)

I now see that part of the problem is the guess is made based on the number of native speakers in a country, not the number of readers, which is a very big mistake.

An important issue is the assumption is that everybody is logged in, and has set up their browser languages etc. Setting up browser languages manually is what nerds were doing in the Netscape times. We are writing 2016. And most users btw. are not registered Wikipedia accounts.

And finally, assumption should be made on basis of the language the Wikipedia is running, the IP solution is developed for en-wiki.

This experiment should be rolled back on all language wikipedias exept en-wiki, until an acceptable algorithm is found.

Reply 20:51, 15 July 2016 1 month ago

Amire80 (talkcontribs)

The guess is not based on the number of native speakers. We use the data from CLDR, which clearly doesn't refer only to native speakers—for example, the entry for Denmark puts English at 86%, which is obviously not the number of native English speakers in Denmark, but probably the number who know it in one way or another. If you can cite data about the number of people in Denmark who can read Swedish or any other language, you should add it there by clicking "add new" in the table.

Also, the software really doesn't assume that everybody is logged in. Obviously, the vast majority of readers are not registered. The languages that they click in the the "more" panel are automatically added to their preferred languages, and the research that we conducted showed that it works for casual readers.

As the FAQ says, the languages defined in the browser and the languages identified by geolocation are secondary to what users actually click. Once you click Swedish for example, you will see it in the compact list.

Reply 10:02, 16 July 2016 1 month ago

Madglad (talkcontribs)

Technical question: How are »The languages that they click in the the "more" panel« added? Cookie? IP-address? Or?

Reply 19:30, 16 July 2016 1 month ago

Nikerabbit (talkcontribs)

Using LocalStorage.

Reply Edited 12:26, 18 July 2016 1 month ago

Amire80 (talkcontribs)

Our research shows that Swedish (and any other language) is less accessible when it is part of a long list than it is through the panel that opens when you click the "more" button.

The Nynorsk Wikipedia defined other Scandinavian languages as preferred in , so they would appear at the top of the long list. The same can be done in the Danish Wikipedia, and Compact Language Links will pick it up (not yet today, but soon).

Reply 10:23, 16 July 2016 1 month ago

Madglad (talkcontribs)

Which research? Link?

Reply 19:20, 16 July 2016 1 month ago

C933103 (talkcontribs)

The CLDR list only cover how many people speak the language not how many people understand the language. For instance in Iceland it say 100% for Icelandic but only 0.7% for Danish and none for other Scandinavian languages. Hindi-Urdu and Malaysian-Indonesian are same language with different vocabulary under different name, but it does not have data for Hindi in Pakistan or data for Indonesian in Malay, and the data for Urdu in India or data for Malay in Indonesia is only ~10% the data for Hindi/Indonesian in respective country. Almost all country in the world have a number of people that hace at least a certain understanding in English but you can see how many regions in the list have English listed. And the list doesn't even have Libyan Arabic in Libya or Taiwanese(Min-nan) in Taiwan. There are also Iran and Iraq which have only listed Central and/or Southern Kurdish but not Kurdish in general.

And did your test ask users the accessibility to a specific language edition with the specific language's name given, or when the user don't know what they are lookibg for which is the most cases?

Reply Edited 12:42, 16 July 2016 1 month ago

Madglad (talkcontribs)

In Iceland they learn Danish in school, so they are able to read Danish as well as their native Icelandic. (The languages are not mutually intelligible). In many countries especially in Europe it's most common to speak more than one language.

Reply 19:19, 16 July 2016 1 month ago

C933103 (talkcontribs)

ah I see, the example might be not that good.

Reply 00:11, 18 July 2016 1 month ago

Amire80 (talkcontribs)

The CLDR list is not perfect and it can be improved. It has direct and visible to add languages and report bugs.

Without Compact Language Links there is nothing that helps a user who is reading the Indonesian Wikipedia to find a link to the Malay language, because it is lost in the long list. With Compact Language Links, it is easier to find, because there is a search box to find the language, and after the user clicks it once, it will remembered.

As for the other question—it's a good question; I'll find it and I'll get back to you.

Reply 12:30, 16 July 2016 1 month ago

C933103 (talkcontribs)

Have you get any answers?

Reply 19:53, 28 July 2016 1 month ago

DidiWeidmann (talkcontribs)

That now not all language links are shown on Wikipedia, is a discrimination of the small languages and nothing else. There was now real need for such a change! All your arguments are very constructed an artificial and only serve to hide a political decision which sole goal is the discrimination of the small language communities: There was absolutely no reason to change the policy of language links: In an alphabetic list of languages there was never a problem to find the right ling even in a list of 200 and more languages! So I can only protest against this arbitral decision an ask to go back to the old System!

Reply 14:27, 4 August 2016 25 days ago

C933103 (talkcontribs)

How about adding a link to CLDR in CLL panel so that people can tell CLDR what languages are missing in their region?
CLDR can be improved but the process seems long. Like I submitted some additional languages being used in Hong Kong back in last year and that already get accepted, but those info are still not available in CLDR v.30 beta which is supposed to be the last CLDR to release in this year according to the release cycle which mean the process of fixing something via CLDR's issue tracker take >1 year.
Even if CLDR data get improved, that still does not resolve the problem that its scope is "population that is able to read and write each language, and is comfortable enough to use it with computers.", instead of "able to understand and retrieve info from the page" which would be a lower standard. For instance, most Chinese users can't write in Japanese but they can read out basic info from Japanese Wikipedia because of the common use of Chinese characters. It will certainly not reflected onto CLDR.

Reply Edited 12:55, 16 July 2016 1 month ago

Amire80 (talkcontribs)

Thanks for submitting fixes for CLDR!

People who can read Japanese (or any other language) will find the language in the panel, and after they click it, they will always see it.

Reply 12:59, 16 July 2016 1 month ago

C933103 (talkcontribs)

but I'm talking about people in general who don't know what they're looking for instead of finding specific language.
After click it then always see it is also problematic because sometime I only want to use the language once and then when those one time clicks accumulate, they would repell those frequent language out of the short list

Reply 15:30, 16 July 2016 1 month ago

Lingveno (talkcontribs)

Thanks for discriminating languages without an exact location, such as Esperanto and Yiddish.

Reply 13:16, 29 July 2016 1 month ago

Frenezulo (talkcontribs)

I'm going to restate some things that were posted above, because they don't seem to have penetrated. In New York City, Wolof, Tajik, Newari, Marathi, Hausa, Guarani, Azerbaijani, and Aymara are all spoken and read, but they will not be likely to appear on any location-based list of languages, because not enough people there speak and read them, and New York is a long way from the places where they originated. Users of these languages won't always think to click a "more languages" link, because they may not realize what the link is supposed to do, and they won't know their language is represented if they don't click to see. The natural assumption, given that some of these languages don't have much internet content to begin with, will be that they aren't there. Allowing users to customize which languages they see only helps if they know which languages they have to choose from.

Reply 11:44, 9 August 2016 20 days ago

Reply to "Language discrimination"

Norwegian bokmål, please turn the system off

25 comments • 16:48, 24 July 2016 1 month ago

25

Dyveldi (talkcontribs)

Unwanted change on Norwegian bokmål Wikipedia. The system is now the default choice if you are logged inn, but it is possible to turn off. The system is not possible to turn off if you read not logged inn. There have been no vote to turn this on. Please turn it off and await a consensus on Norwegian bokmål Wikipedia that it is our choice to use this. There is a discussion raised on noWP, https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tinget#Kompakte_spr.C3.A5klenker_skrudd_p.C3.A5_for_denne_wikien_i_dag . Turn the change off and await a decision on noWP. Thanks, regards. Dyveldi

Reply 09:57, 17 July 2016 1 month ago

Jeblad (talkcontribs)

The user has attempted to start a voting over the feature, but it is now closed as premature. The closed thread is at w:no:Wikipedia:Tinget#Avstemning om tvungen innføring av «Kompakte språklenker». I sort of expect the thread to be reopened.

Reply Edited 16:05, 19 July 2016 1 month ago

Migrant (talkcontribs)

Sorry for not noticing the voting was closed, and hoping it opens again.

Reply 13:14, 20 July 2016 1 month ago

Telaneo (talkcontribs)

There is still no consensus to introduce this feature as default on nowiki. Please turn it off.

Reply 15:52, 19 July 2016 1 month ago

Jeblad (talkcontribs)

There are no consensus for anything on nowiki.

Reply 16:09, 19 July 2016 1 month ago

Hebue (talkcontribs)

Well, we do in fact have a norwegian wiki, mainly working quite well. Any lack of consesus might be either implicit or explicit. In this case it is quite explicit.

Reply 15:26, 20 July 2016 1 month ago

Telaneo (talkcontribs)

Well, a majority then. Still no reason for it to be introduced and forced upon the users.

Reply 16:11, 19 July 2016 1 month ago

Migrant (talkcontribs)

Agrees with user Dyveldi and user Telaneo in this subject. hopefully it can be a optional for logged in users and not a default. This makes it more hard for finding other languages the same subject is written on.

Reply 13:13, 20 July 2016 1 month ago

Nsaa (talkcontribs)

Please turn this feature off as Default. Make it available for users that Choose to turn it on. Hiding information like this is not good.

Reply 06:11, 21 July 2016 1 month ago

Jeblad (talkcontribs)

There are no consensus on nowiki to turn this off. There are although pretty clear indications that a number of users have no clear idea how this feature is used, and even how to turn it on and off.

Reply Edited 08:51, 21 July 2016 1 month ago

Noorse (talkcontribs)

There was no consensus to turn it on either. Make it a opt-in feature. Not an opt-out.

Reply 10:51, 22 July 2016 1 month ago

Telaneo (talkcontribs)

Nor was there consensus to turn it on in the first place.

Reply 08:51, 21 July 2016 1 month ago

Jeblad (talkcontribs)

It is the usual "nobody has asked me" with the usual drama queens involved. ;/

Reply 08:53, 21 July 2016 1 month ago

Noorse (talkcontribs)

As far as I've been able to establish, nobody asked anyone in the community (possibly exept one user, Jeblad) about turning this on. This hit as lightning from a clear blue sky.

Reply 10:53, 22 July 2016 1 month ago

Jeblad (talkcontribs)

Why do you continue claiming that I had anything to do with this being turned on? You have been told several times that this is not true! This is an effort by the language team!

Reply 12:07, 22 July 2016 1 month ago

Noorse (talkcontribs)

I'm not saying you turned it on.

I'm saying that as far as I've been able to establish there were no check done with the community before turning this on. If anyone knew in advance, it seems only to have been you.

Furthermore: you seem to be the only one wanting this and welcoming it as it is at nb-wiki.

I've repeatedly tried to explain this to you, and you insist on claiming it's something else. Please cease steadfastily misrepresenting what I write.

Reply Edited 13:54, 22 July 2016 1 month ago

Jeblad (talkcontribs)

No I'm not the only one. Have you read what GAD said? Have you read what pmt said? Have you read what Floyd said? Have you read what stigmj said? And TommyG, and Ters, … No it is not only me.

But it do seems like the usual IP-crowd are emerging. ;/

Reply 20:38, 23 July 2016 1 month ago

Noorse (talkcontribs)

I said "seem(s)". I accept you can't do anything but attack and accuse those who disagree.

Reply 16:48, 24 July 2016 1 month ago

Telaneo (talkcontribs)

-.-

Reply 08:55, 21 July 2016 1 month ago

Nsaa (talkcontribs)

Just turn it of. This was never asked by the no.wikipedia-community. There has been raised a number of issues around this new functionality.

For people not logged in, it's not even possible to turn it off. People should see all languages as default. Hiding information is against Wikipedia principles, see Jimmy Wales here https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-March/020469.html

That this functionality is turned on default should be rolled back immediately per https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tinget#Avstemning_om_tvungen_innf.C3.B8ring_av_.C2.ABKompakte_spr.C3.A5klenker.C2.BB

Reply 06:52, 22 July 2016 1 month ago

Noorse (talkcontribs)

moving my reply further down.

Reply Edited 10:54, 22 July 2016 1 month ago

Jeblad (talkcontribs)

No consensus on the so-called voting. It has even been closed, but as I said earlier in this thread I would not be surprised if it were restarted.

Reply 08:36, 22 July 2016 1 month ago

Dyveldi (talkcontribs)

Voting was never closed. It was hidden by a collapse function. People voted in spite of the hiding. The collapse was removed 23 hours ago. All of this Jeblad knows very well as it happened 15 hours before Jeblad wrote the above https://no.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3ATinget&type=revision&diff=16540006&oldid=16539933. Jeblad has written on Tinget 10 times afterward, which is not an unusual frequency for Jeblad and he is known to follow Tinget very closely.

Reply 17:19, 22 July 2016 1 month ago

Jeblad (talkcontribs)

Text from Wikipedia:Tinget (Those that want to read the text should translate it themselves. I completely agree with Stigmj on this.)

Jeg har kollapset hele denne avstemningen av følgende grunner:

Først og fremst fordi den går mot hele prinsippet med at avstemninger har et minstekrav til deltakelse (registrerte brukere etc.)
Dernest fordi det er ekstremt prematurt da hele temaet og "diskusjonen" som ledet opp til denne ble gjennomført i løpet av en helg. Det er ikke tilstrekkelig tid til at alle kan få tenkt igjennom situasjonen eller sagt sitt før en eventuell avstemning skal påbegynnes.

-- Stigmj (diskusjon) 18. jul. 2016 kl. 11:49 (CEST)

Reply Edited 20:34, 22 July 2016 1 month ago

Noorse (talkcontribs)

Supporting Nsaa, Migrant, Telaneo, Dyveldi and others (at nb-wiki) requesting this turned off as a standard. Make it opt-in.

Reply 10:36, 22 July 2016 1 month ago

Reply to "Norwegian bokmål, please turn the system off"

How to turn off CLL at all WMF's wikis

12 comments • 15:22, 20 July 2016 1 month ago

12

Summary by Elitre (WMF)

Personal opt-out from the feature is provided officially and available from Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering. Furthermore, example code is being worked on Phabricator (see here) to allow advanced users to make a choice and disable the feature on each WMF site for themselves, if this is what they want.

Usually, the preferred place for discussions with developers about features, bugs and configuration is Phabricator. Requests for configuration change, such as enabling or disabling a feature, must be made in Phabricator after a discussion in the community took place, taking into account the problems the feature is trying to solve, the different types of users and use cases, and the possibility of fixing the features rather than disabling the feature entirely. The team has never stopped discussing with community members, and has actively addressed ru.voy's concerns.

Although it's understood that this is done in good faith, please refrain in the future from suggesting unreviewed code which may not work as intended, may be used somewhere by people who are not fully aware of its consequences (especially unintended ones) and may use it to bypass other users' legit decisions to use a certain tool or feature. Thanks for your understanding.

Martin Urbanec (talkcontribs)

This transfer discussion from https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T138524

Kusurija: Hi All! Please, tell me, what can I do to disable this "Compact Language Links" anywhere on any Wikimedia project. Because it definitely paralyses my work with them. It paralyses my work not only as Wikimedia project editor, but paralyses my work with all Wikimedia projects as sources of information anywhere outside of WMF. If You can't offer me, any usable solution, please tell me, where else could I defense my rights to non impeded information from any Wikimedia project as source. Thanks for answer.

Me: The only one possibility is to turn off it at all WMF wikis individually. There isn't something like global settings, sorry for it.

But I don't know why it is paralysing your work with WMF's projects. Could you explain to me?

Kusurija: Because I'm working with cs,wictionary, on dictionaries out of WMF, themes, where I gather information from any site of WMF projects (so languages in use, where I gather info is about 70 (seventy, not seven). Most often languages I use, besides my motherlanguage Czech is samogitian, lithuanian, japanese, russian, byelorussian, ukrainian, polish, slovak, english, lettonian, latgalian, latin, chinese (Kantonese), slovene, bulgarian, macedonian, greece, swedish, african, neederlandese, vietnamese, hindi, kannadian, georgian, german, french, italian, spain, romanian, portuguese, ... ... And how i can switch out it?

Me: I asked on IRC for another solutions. I'll notify you when I'll know something more.

Kusurija: Should I remove it on all about 750 projects of WMF? I tried it, it takes about 2.5 minutes or more for each, It means about more than 3000 minutes it is 50 hours (some of projects takes time to first find/load them), it is more, than entire 2 days or more, than a week of workhours. Why I am banned to work such nonsense work?!

Me: You could copy https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedista:Martin_Urbanec/Random_notes/Compact_language_links_turn_off.js to your global.js subpage on meta and then visit every WMF wiki. It should disable the feature and notify you about it. With global.js subpage I mean https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Kusurija/global.js for you.

Kusurija: Kde najdu to Cache na této mojí stránce:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Kusurija/global.js ?? Nikde ho nemohu

najít, nemám k tomu ze svého prohlížeče Mozzila Firefox přístup...

Me: Translation: Where can I find cache at my page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Kusurija/global.js ? I can't find it, I have no access to it from my browser (Mozilla Firefox).

Pokud by to nefungovalo, stiskněte Ctrl+R anebo Ctrl+F5 (tím se vyprázdní cache). Při návštěvě každé wiki by se compact language links měl automaticky vypnout, tedy by Vás nic nemělo paralyzovat.

Translation of my reply: If it won't work please hit Ctrl+R or Ctrl+F5 (it'll clear the cache). When you'll first visit a wiki compact language links will be automaticlly turned off so nothing will paralyse you.

Me: Cs: Funguje to? En: Does it work?

Aklapper: [en] This task is about disabling Compact Language Links by default on Russian Wikivoyage.

Could you bring up your topic on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Language_Selector/Compact_Language_Links please, where it is better suited? Thanks for your understanding!

[cs] Muzes prosim diskutovat na https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Language_Selector/Compact_Language_Links , protoze tento task je o ruske Wikivoyage? Diky moc!

Kusurija: You are welcome to transfer it Yourself, because i'm not familiar with

editing on phabricator.wikimedia enough to do it myself. Thank You. (If You

can, transfer the answers too.). Yours sincerely kusurija

Atsirlin^: @Urbanecm: I confirm that this patch does not work, and I second Kusurija's question. It is highly relevant to this thread.

Kusurija: By the way: this nonsense works for non-logged. It is illegitimate censoring, as most of non-logged users does NOT understand, what it means, and does NOT see languages relevant for them. Is there any authority, superiot to authors of this nonsense, who could put them in order??

Me: @Atsirlin It must be inserted at meta to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Atsirlin/global.js for you and I can't see it there (and no delete log present). Then it should automatically turn off at all WMF wikis when you'll first visit them.

06:54, 17 July 2016 1 month ago

Atsirlin (talkcontribs)

Yes, it works for me. Now the question is how I can apply a similar patch for all users of a project

08:30, 17 July 2016 1 month ago

Martin Urbanec (talkcontribs)

You can insert the same code to MediaWiki:Common.js as an admin but I do not recommend it because it will turn off CLL for all users and nobody will be able to activate it (at every visit it'll be automatically turned off independently of user settings). Or you can create a new gadget with this code which will be turned on at default state.

08:37, 17 July 2016 1 month ago

Atsirlin (talkcontribs)

Well, that's exactly my question. I added this code to MediaWiki:Common.js, but it does not deactivate CLL for anonymous users. Of course, it will be ideal if we could switch CLL off by default and leave every user an option of activating it. However, in the current circumstances, when we are refused of switching CLL off, we are left with the choice of keeping it as it is or deactivating it completely (if we find the way to do so).

16:40, 17 July 2016 1 month ago

Martin Urbanec (talkcontribs)

Yep, this don't deactivate CLL for anonymous simply because anons have no user settings so any settings can't be changed for them. I asked at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/conpherence/398/ for solution about this issue. You can look at it and find out if somebody replied.

16:52, 17 July 2016 1 month ago

Atsirlin (talkcontribs)

OK, I understand. Thank you for your support, Martin!

18:11, 17 July 2016 1 month ago

Martin Urbanec (talkcontribs)

You're welcome :).

19:01, 17 July 2016 1 month ago

Kusurija (talkcontribs)

I tried see cs.wikipedia as IP adress (anonymous) and - as I often on my computer see samogitian wikipedia, I on CLL get offer: 1-st english (it's naturally), but 2-nd: samogitian, 3-rd: lithuanian. OK, so if I'd be of bad willing (if), I could go to internet cafee service, there sit and use computer, see wikipedia in chinese, tamil, kannadian, lao, tibetian... and several other languages, which lithuanians can't understand, even see anything but white squares (as on these computers are not implemented such uncommon letters (fonts)) several times interchangeably - and this would practically block ability to watch wikipedia at all for all users after me. If in internet caffe services use to be many computers, I could do any time the same on other PC set. And in other internet caffe services, also in other cities... So I think, that for anonymes must be CLL switched off by default, only who want, can switch it on.

17:44, 18 July 2016 1 month ago

Santhosh.thottingal (talkcontribs)

The languages you would see from Lithuania is based on country code. So that does not change whether you are anonymous or logged in user. Kannada, Chinese, Lao , Tibetan will not be shown for a user at Lithuania, unless a user click these language links(we use previous languages). There is no case compacting a language list to small size and then offering a selector to search in a big list block ability to watch wikipedia. No languages are removed, and the search for a language is provided. Please see this FAQ entry. Thanks

03:38, 19 July 2016 1 month ago

Kusurija (talkcontribs)

I see You did not understand. Yes You are true with it, that, when I in first moment log as anonymous, these languages will not be shown until I especially shall find and see these (Kannada, Chinese, Lao , Tibetan ans so on) wikipedia's pages. After several seeing, the priority of languages will be automatically changed. So another human, who comes to see after me, will be able get offer in these languages, and, could not understand any of them, will be deprived of ability to get information from wikipedia. This must be denied, because it works.

07:38, 20 July 2016 1 month ago

Martin Urbanec (talkcontribs)

I can't help you with it and I have no permissions to decide things like this. You can ask for somebody who can give you better answers than me at #wikimedia-tech at irc.freenode.net (you can use client at http://webchat.freenode.net/).

17:50, 18 July 2016 1 month ago

Kusurija (talkcontribs)

I will never use IRC due to collapse of my PC trying join to IRC.

07:42, 20 July 2016 1 month ago

Talk:Universal Language Selector/Compact Language Links

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Wikipedia as seen from Norwegian ip-adresses

WP for Norwegian bokmål has voted against

This still sucks.

Editing the default languages

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Inspect Babel Options

Another Google Inc.?

Language discrimination

Norwegian bokmål, please turn the system off

How to turn off CLL at all WMF's wikis

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