Talk:Universal Language Selector/Design/Interlanguage links

Feel free to provide any feedback

Reports
Now that the code landed in the ULS repo \o/ can we file bugs and enhancement requests in the ULS component? --Nemo 11:06, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, I filed two before I forget, with [Interlanguage links] label. --Nemo 21:57, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

ULS in "personal" position
What's wrong with this feature when the ULS trigger is in the personal tools position? It works just fine for me on after enabling it in preferences, the ellipsis button is very clear and the language selector opens in a sensible way. --Nemo 20:55, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Removed from ULS, filed a bug. --Nemo 07:32, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for reporting this. There are a couple of related improvements we are working on:
 * Make sure that the beta feature is not listed as a beta feature on those wikis where it cannot be applied to avoid confusion.
 * Use a more accurate way to determine if the feature should be available for a given wiki. Currently the ULS position is used as a conservative way to make sure the feature only applies to wikis where we are sure interlanguage links exist. We can base this logic on $wgInterwikiMagic and $wgHideInterlanguageLinks instead which are the variables directly related to the use of interlanguage links on the sidebar.
 * --Pginer (talk) 11:52, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

Confusing selection of languages
Visiting no:Oslo with the eetension turned on I got
 * (af) Afrikaans
 * (am) አማርኛ
 * (an) aragonés
 * (ang) Ænglisc
 * (ar) العربية
 * (arc) ܐܪܡܝܐ
 * (en) English
 * (nn) norsk (nynorsk)
 * (se) sámegiella

Nynorsk is a variant of Norwegian and is correct, Northern Sami is another language used in Norway. English is a common secondary language. Due to the number of people in Norway from other countries I would expect to find Swedish (sv), Danish (da), Deutsch (de), and perhaps Urdu (bal), Finnish (fi), Russian (ru). In addition I would expect to find Icelandic (is) and Faroese (fo) due to geographical closeness and similarity of language.

In short, the present list of languages seems weird. 109.247.163.112 10:41, 29 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi. Can you please put this on the Talk page instead? Thanks! Niharika (talk) 16:18, 29 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Done.
 * See FAQ "How does Universal Language Selector determine which languages I may understand?".
 * http://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/latest/supplemental/territory_language_information.html#NO doesn't have any of the languages you mentioned, please file bugs to them as explained in the FAQ. --Nemo 08:32, 30 March 2014 (UTC)
 * From your list of languages it seems that the system detects three languages that are relevant to you (en, nn, se) and the rest are filled with the first 6 languages the article is available in alphabetical order. With the recent version that was deployed of this beta feature, those less-meaningful 6 slots will be filled by other languages based on your previous choices. Additional criteria is considered for the future to make these "free slots" as meaningful as possible, but it it is not implemented yet. Thanks for your detailed feedback, and feel free to provide more as the feature evolved. --Pginer (talk) 07:56, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

Featured articles/lists
FAs and FLs should be displayed correctly, preferably given priority. I'm in a FL page, and I need some information that might be available from other languages with FL status, but I can't find the familiar yellow star on the short list nor in the pop-up. Bennylin (talk) 15:27, 10 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I totally agree with Bennylin. --151.231.110.157 20:04, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I agree this, too.--Alex00728 (talk) 00:27, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

Display languages with star
Languages in which the article is featured should be displayed in the short list. It is interesting to see, in which languages an article is featured (for example Berlin is featured in Afrikaans rather than in German. FraYzi (talk) 23:53, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

exclude closed and locked projects?
On it.wikisource I get Aenglisc (ang) as the first language of the list. This is rather weird, not only because the language is dead since many centuries, but even more because ang.source has been closed ages ago. Can you guys just directly exclude it (and possibly others, like ht.source)? I cannot think of any reason why somebody should want to visit a project which is closed and has very little content, if any. Thanks Candalua (talk) 22:29, 10 June 2014 (UTC)
 * ULS doesn't add any link, it only filters those which are already there. I don't think this sort of filtering should be done in ULS: if you think closed wikis shouldn't be in interlanguage links, you should either get them removed from sitelinks in wikidata or file a bug for them not to be used (I think I already saw this request, might be in WikimediaMaintenance, Wikimedia>General or Wikimedia>Site requests). --Nemo 17:07, 11 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Already tried to have sitelinks removed :D but some people insisted they should be there (I don't understand for which reason, but I suspect only reason was to "see that all domains have been added and none is missing"). Anyway apart from the fact that ang.source is closed, I don't really get the rationale of the links I'm getting. Intuitevely, I think one should get the languages which are more important world-wide, or which are spoken in his/her region or country, or are related in some way to his/her language. But what I'm getting is: Aenglisc, Arab, Catalan, German, Greek, English, French, Hungarian, Slovenian. Not even Spanish is there, how come that Aenglisc is?! Candalua (talk) 19:41, 11 June 2014 (UTC)


 * IIRC there are configuration settings that a wiki could use to exclude some target sites from the interwikis. Sadly, "ang" is there simply for reasons of alphabetical precedence. You're right that the language selection is very bad, that's something that needs to be worked on case by case: for Italian see 62346, it was a big effort but it should be much better after CLDR 26 is released (September). --Nemo 19:50, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Some languages are missing
I noticed that: and maybe other inter-wiki links with more than 2 characters to define "language code" are missing from the side bar once "Compact language links" are enabled. Kazkaskazkasako (talk) 08:50, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
 * bat_smg
 * be_x_old


 * It's not about length, it's probably Language codes / 19986 striking again: invalid language codes don't work well with the language selector (or don't work at all). --Nemo 09:05, 30 June 2014 (UTC)


 * @Nemo: thanks for noting down this bug! Kazkaskazkasako (talk) 15:43, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Missing some interlanguage links
I recently started to using this new feature on English Wikipedia. Since I am interested in Asian languages, I soon found that some of them is missing when I press the "more" button. They are Cantonese (code: zh-yue) and Southern Min (code: zh-min-nan). It can be seen in articles like 1 (number). --Quest for Truth (talk) 09:49, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi, Cantonese is definitely available on that article when you press the More button. Use the search bar to look for it. NiharikaKohli (talk) 13:07, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

Language variants selection
I really like the compact list. This helps me not to scroll down long list for some page to look after Chinese in English Wikipedia. And in Chinese Wikipedia, I also spent less time for looking for English related wiki.

This is a bug(51242) talking about the Support language variant selection at ULS, which suggest adding language variants in the language list instead of top bar right after Page/Discussion. I think it's pretty great to integrate language variants in ULS and looks good to UX transition. But experienced user use this feature heavily. And some technical problem force us to keep this selection in a outstanding position cause some ordinary reader often mislead to a language variant they don't want to, usually comes after a url.--Fantasticfears (talk) 07:32, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

At first I just laughed but now I see a (small) point
I had switched it on by mistake, had just enabled all Beta and did not understand for a while why the language sidebar was different. Found it disturbing. Showed only on enwiki, not others. As I often go thru several language versions when starting new articles on swwiki (because sometimes Latina or Platt has a better opening than enwiki or simplewiki), I found it irritating, then funny and also a bit absurd. "Nederlands" in America (but no Portuguese)? "Hindi" in Middle East? (we know the subcontinent is moving, but NORTH! not West).

Today I tried to complain - on enwiki because it showed only there. Ok, now I was informed and tried to understand the idea. So Kurdish is always on top for me because my PC is in Iran. I have not yet found out why Simple was mostly in "Worldwide", but sometimes in Europe. Maybe because I live in a country where I access a number of sites only thru proxies? And sometimes have a proxy on when looking into wikipedia?

Altogether I do not see that the whole effort to sort languages by regions is a sensible one. Nederlands in America, ok there is Surinam. But there may be as many German Speakers in America. Probably more Italian Speakers in America than Nederlands. This sorting demands from the user to learn the inherent (il?) logic somehow by experience, which language is under which circumstance to be expected worldwide or in a region... The (incomplete?) collection of barely existing "artificial languages" under Worldwide (always on top!!!) is funny. Same for the varying (?!) list of remaining 10 languages on the left, which somehow reach from A-K, but by criteria I cannot even try to guess. (I think Abkhazian is mostly in, but not Bashkort or Boarisch, Deutsch mostly yes...) ... ABC is easier for me.

Then the "Common languages". No, it is not a good idea. Just because someone sits in Tehran, he should not be forced to look at Arabic, Farsi, Kurdish, Mazanderani (but NOT Gilaki???) and ქართული links first. Why??? Besides, many small languages have more readers in exile than at home. Then you should tag Somali to New York City, not to Africa. That is where the users are!

Finally '''on the positive side. Yes, I sense a good idea'''. For someone like me it would save time if I can pick up to 10 languages, which I check often, into my personal choice pop up menue (say on top of the abc-languages list as no. 1). If you can do that: GREAT! Otherwise: better forget it. Kipala (talk) 18:58, 24 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks Kipala, it seems you may have found some mistakes in the data about languages. Please help correct them, bringing sources: ULS/FAQ. --Nemo 20:26, 30 May 2015 (UTC)


 * I also see Nederlands in the America section, and I am in remote Australia. That is very strange! John Vandenberg (talk) 06:23, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

What languages it shows by default
Boy, this seems to be the eternal question here, doesn't it. At least for signed-in users ...
 * 1) Let people choose.
 * 2) At minimum, start with any languages listed, or at least any languages listed at level 2 or better, in the user's babel. That ought to be a pretty good indication as to where to start. For people who have more than 6 languages at level 2 or better, G-d bless them, but I don't have suggestions. StevenJ81 (talk) 14:20, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

Please make it stick across devices so that it works across handsets, tablets, and desktop
We've long talked about this feature and in a multi device world we shouldn't have to train each of our devices about what languages we speak Tfinc (talk)
 * Thanks for the feedback. That makes a lot of sense. There is no need to repeat the learning process once per device. Pginer (talk) 01:41, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Good idea. Could be very useful on cell phones-- Evannerraw

Edit manually
I just activated the new Beta function, as the first on the german wikipedia (yay!). How ever, the inital languages it shows (Alemannisch, العرب, Boarisch, català, English, français, italiano, lumbaart, rumantsch) are completely irrelevant to me and I'm missing a direct way of editing them (add, remove, sort) cause it should look more like (Deutsch, English, Alemannisch, français).--Sevku (talk) 19:29, 13 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm the first who have activated it on the Dutch Wikipedia and I have the same question. - Supercarwaar (talk) 19:54, 13 March 2014 (UTC)
 * For context, the list comes from here: . And if I understand correctly, when it comes to languages considered by CLDR in use in the country, it picks the first by number of speakers to reach the amount of 7-9. Languages that one has previously selected in ULS should come first in theory? I tried to select Latin but I don't manage to get it to the list. --Nemo 21:17, 13 March 2014 (UTC)
 * First, thanks for your interest in the feature and providing detailed feedback. Our design goal is to make a set-up process unnecessary by making it unnecessary to select a language more than once it if was not included in the initial list (since your last choices should be remembered). However, it seems that some of the criteria for selecting the relevant languages are not working yet. In particular previous choices should be the most important criteria to make a language appear in the initial list and are not working now. In a context where selecting a language to access content makes it appear the next time, there is not much need for having a specific set-up process, but once the criteria for anticipating languages is working, we can reevaluate this --Pginer (talk) 12:54, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Automation is NEVER going to work in a satisfying way if it is about choosing languages for a user. This is a problem that is almost as old as the WWW. One of the main reasons is that language and geographical information doesn't correlate too often. There are so many different reasons it can go wrong - a person moving to another part of the world, a person studying or using a "distant" foreign language, a person belonging to a minority, a person living in a non-English part of the world, a person just wanting to find a date or a picture (in any language)... Automation is overkill in a situation where there is only a few hundred languages to choose from.
 * I had the same problem on Portuguese Wikipedia: the list I got when I used pt-BR in my preferences was not really interesting. For now, I prefer to keep using a hack: b:pt:User:Helder.wiki/Tools/FilterInterlanguageLinks.js. Helder.wiki 16:04, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I would also vote a feature to make prominent language I have an interest in. The showed language are not relevant.  --198.48.204.201 03:43, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
 * +1 for edit manually. I want specific languages there. I use Wikipedia for language learning, too, though not often. Automation doesn't seem to pick it up. Just add an option under language settings popup or whatever. --Sigmundur (talk) 13:49, 16 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Showing languages I have showed an interest in does not always work. I often use iw links of languages I do not understand, e.g. to find files to use, or languages I understand only rudimentarily (but associated with the subject of the article), to perhaps get a hint or reference about a missing or dubious statement. Having these languages permanently added to the shorter list makes its contents more or less randomly chosen. Personally, I probably will use the complete list, but such "pollution" of the short list will probably annoy many users and have them refrain from checking exotic languages - which is a very nice aspect of using Wikipedia. --LPfi (talk) 14:49, 24 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Why is this still not implemented? This is the best form for user, and easier for devs, user choose what he wants not some script that is irrelevant. -- (Oxmaster (talk) 17:59, 9 June 2014 (UTC))
 * Have you tried recently? There was a patch some time ago which should have helped this. --Nemo 17:14, 11 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Can't see anything new, list still appears like this when browsing eng: العربية Български Bosanski Català Čeština Deutsch Lietuvių Polski Українська, I only understand 1 language from these, and I don't need whole list of 7 langs when I'm using only 2. -- Oxmaster 15:04, 16 June 2014 (UTC)
 * So you want to reduce the number of languages shown? Nothing was done about that, there isn't a bugzilla report either. Worth testing: if I manually select a language from the language search, does the same language automatically show up next time? --Nemo 15:07, 17 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Totally agree with to LPfi and Oxmaster. Why not just put a list of languages the user can choose to add to the languages block rather than an automatic system that will never work correctly (I mean display the exact languages the user want to see). It would be implemented in less than 1 hour...
 * Trying to add my opinion here too. If you want to keep the ULS "as it is", please also provide a "edit manually" feature under language settings. Agree totally with Oxmaster and others: Edit manually is by far the best solution. --PSoren (talk) 15:14, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

By default it's showing so many completely random languages. All I want is to choose English, Portuguese and Spanish. You won't guess that from me no matter how much you spy on me! It's so easy to just let users set and done. Perfect. 2001:8A0:432E:FD01:3513:5C62:AB0:2B10 11:02, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Actually your preference seems very easy to guess: you have a Portuguese IP and the current statistics for Portugal agree with your preferences. Only Spanish is missing... it took a while but I finally found some data and filed a request to Add Spanish language to Portugal (PT). Please help improving the data further (see ULS/FAQ). Nemo 12:13, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Feedback form German WP
CLDR 27 incorporated the fix

Hi, some feedback at german WP: The selection of interwikilinks is apparently automatic and very intransparent, not like a whitelist. See de:Wikipedia:Fragen zur Wikipedia/Archiv/2014/Woche 18 (28. April 2014). --Atlasowa (talk) 11:37, 28 April 2014 (UTC)
 * From what I can see from a machine translations, users over there only pointed out that what's statistically good on average won't be perfect for everyone. French and Danish, the two languages the user was looking for, should probably be higher in the list for German users: certainly before Greek, for instance. KaiMartin,YMS, please see in the FAQ how you can get the default order improved. We need your help! --Nemo 07:05, 5 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Denny filed it for you, with help from DerHexer: http://unicode.org/cldr/trac/ticket/7913 --Nemo 13:46, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Needed improvements

 * 1) Ability to set a list of specific languages in user preferences.
 * 2) Always (?) list the "fall-back" languages of the local wiki and the user's home wiki - WMediaWiki already knows what these are, if they are defined.
 * 3) List the language the user has set for the interface - if not the wiki-native language.

For signed in users the wiki has useful knowledge, which we should use.

Rich Farmbrough 11:32, 2 May 2014 (UTC).


 * We're not going to add new preferences.
 * Home wiki perhaps, see below.
 * Interface language... that would be easy, but it would make the distinction between interface and content language even more intricated. --Nemo 20:37, 15 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Hey. If you don’t want to add new preferences, then don’t add new features that require preferences. This “beta feature” just does not work at all if you don’t let the user choose the languages. --Gorlingor (talk) 14:34, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Customization
How can I edit which languages are relevant to me? --Wikitiki89 (talk) 18:45, 1 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi. If you pick a language once, it'll automatically appear in your list from next time, if an article is supported in that language. You don't need to explicitly select languages. If you're still not satisfied, you could give us some more details here about where you are from, what languages you see, and what'll you like to see for a popular article such as Water. Or file a bug for it on Bugzilla. Thank you. Niharika (talk) 12:44, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

What happens if one clicks many languages once? I assume (hope) they are not all shown afterwards? It often happens to me when checking multiple articles for specific graphics – I just click all languages, even if I don't understand them which is why I normally wouldn't select them afterwards anymore. --Patrick87 (talk) 12:57, 2 April 2014 (UTC)


 * No, not all will be shown afterwards. The most recent 2-3 only. We will increase/decrease this number based on feedback. Niharika (talk) 17:44, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I think it would be better to be able to customize it more. I like to read in many languages and I don't want my most common few (which itself is around 5 or 6) to be kicked out by some random languages I decide to check out. --Wikitiki89 (talk) 00:02, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

I object to the tool learn which languages I prefer from saving my edits. This violates users' privacy. If you introduce a tool like this would you please make it opt-in only. – If you would like to receive more feedback from me please ping me on German or English Wikipedia as I do not read here regularly and I have notifications switched off here. Thx.--Aschmidt (talk) 00:15, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Edits are suggested in the section below but that's not going to happen for performance if anything else. --Nemo 20:37, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Fetch default language list from user contributions
For logged-in users, can we make it fetch the preferred language list from the list of wikis the user has contributed to? For example, if a user is active in zhwiki and frwiki, the default language list will automatically be populated with links to those wikis when the page available in that language. Or, fetch the language list from a subpage in userspace, like Special:MyPage/PreferredLanguages (Some protection needs to be set up to prevent other users from editing it, like the *.js and *.css files). Anyway, I think the GeoIP solution works well for anons. Zhaofeng Li (talk) 14:27, 9 July 2014 (UTC)


 * The subpage is not feasible; perhaps we could use the babel information as they do in Wikidata, but it's quite hacky. Contributions to other wikis are not known to MediaWiki; the best I can imagine is accessing the "homewiki" from CentralAuth, but it would be a weird dependency on another extension. --Nemo 20:37, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Language related to the topic
Two more things. [...] And then ideally (although it would need extra information to be provided), an article should have an "article preferred interwiki" (i.e. not user preference). What I meant is, for language related articles, for example, ideally one of the shown interwikis should be from that language's Wikipedia article (when available). Granted it might not work for all articles, but most of the time I want to know what the speaker of the language said about that topic in their own language. Bennylin (talk) 13:32, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't think this will be possible. Perhaps a user javascript may do this by fetching some additional metadata from wikidata. Sometimes there may be coordinates associated to the current page, that we could use in theory for a second geolocated language guess, but sounds far fetched as well. --Nemo 20:37, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Opinion
The idea is really great but I can not see usefullness if there won't be an option to manually select languages by user himself. The user must decided which languages are not needed to him. He also must have an option to sort languages from #1 to #111 (for example) as he wish. With regards, --Janezdrilc (talk) 21:42, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I strongly agree with Janezdrilc! I want to decide by myself which languages I prefer and I think most users would like in this way, too. No one can one the user preference better then the user himself! Doesn't it sound logic? --Daniele Pugliesi (talk) 20:46, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Also strongly agree with the above. --Elekhh (talk) 05:57, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Cross-wiki memory
This tool does not remember which languages I use most. Gryllida 03:21, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Use most where, in ULS itself? --Nemo 06:54, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
 * When reading articles, I have to search for a language manually. I do it by clicking '...' and searching for it in the small popup.
 * I have to keep doing this across different sister projects by hand. And since
 * the popup is slower to use than scrolling down a long list, and
 * it remembers only for one sister project at a time,
 * I get a negative impression in short-term. (In long-term, I'd've done this across all sister projects, and I'd be all set. It's a laborious process.) --Gryllida 05:08, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
 * The lack of a global settings system prevents the system to learn from what happens in different wikis. But even in the initial scenario, having the possibility to search for the language provides more flexibility in finding your language than what we currently have. -- Pginer (talk) 07:55, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

With GUP now enabled, using babel for the language selection would be great. It is a hack, I know, but for those of us who travel around many wikis it would be a simple way to define global settings for the sidebar. John Vandenberg (talk) 07:53, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

Custom CSS rules
I know I'm simplifying things, but what is wrong with Use JS to add some knobs and to persist the user's choice in his or her profile, and you should be done. Paradoctor (talk) 21:58, 26 March 2014 (UTC)
 * 1) p-lang li {display:none}
 * 2) p-lang .interwiki-de,
 * 3) p-lang .interwiki-es,
 * 4) p-lang .interwiki-fr,
 * 5) p-lang .interwiki-en {display:list-item}


 * I think that's an excellent suggestion. It'll resolve quite a few complaints. I'll work on it. Thanks! Niharika (talk) 02:53, 27 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Niharika, have you worked on this? Is there a bug report detailing the requirements? --Nemo 17:45, 15 July 2014 (UTC)
 * For context, each bullet currently looks something like this: . So we already have the class interlanguage-link to manipulate all links at once, and classes like interwiki-it to manipulate them on selected languages. --Nemo 21:10, 15 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Nemo, I did this quite some time ago. Patch ID 121296 in gerrit.


 * I think Paradoctor meant you could hide the interwikis via CSS rather than JS manipulation, but that's not trivial to do. --Nemo 06:58, 22 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Via CSS manipulation only? That would be quite impossible. CSS is just static markup. Niharika (talk) 13:21, 1 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks,  works for me. The gadget still permitted language links for languages I'm not interested in. –Be..anyone (talk) 09:08, 22 October 2014 (UTC)=== Chosing the order of languages ===

This great idea of compacting the language list is made completely inefficient by the impossibility to select the language we wish to see, what should be quite easy to configurate for registered user (or maybe not, I don't know anything about coding). I stopped using the Universal Language Selector as it consistently offered me languages I can't understand, and hid languages I read (an use to translate articles to fr.wiki). Encolpe 05:51, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
 * If you put  on your user page, you not only help other users to find a common language, but some tools use it too (e.g. this or that which highlights languages you speak on Wikidata item pages). --Tacsipacsi (talk) 17:26, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

I agree that at the moment this tool is useless. I get romanian, catalan, german, french, spanish, hebrew, croation and Indonesian. WTF. I don't use these languages, neither are they specified in my Babel template. This would ONLY be useful if the system allowed to set the languages I prefer to see first. Whatever algorhythm it uses, it clearly doesn't work, as demonstrated by a lot of people here. Teemeah (talk) 17:54, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Whatever the system is, it clearly works for some, as demonstrated by thousands users who keep the feature enabled. :) Have you tried clicking the languages you are interested in and then checking whether the selection is better next time? I'm not sure what country you are in, please check ULS/FAQ and help improve the guesses. Nemo 18:06, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Missing steps to reproduce or not actionable

 * Help appreciated to figure out the following reports identifying whether they're still relevant and how to reproduce them.

Question
I turned it on my account at id.wiki, but the iw links didn't change. It worked on my beta-wiki and en.wiki accounts. It didn't work even when I switched the skin from mono to vector. Is this a known bug? Bennylin (talk) 19:53, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Works for me on id.wiki. Probably some local gadget or script of yours interfering? --Nemo 21:23, 14 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Works for me on id.wiki as well. --Niharika


 * I logged in as my robot, and it works. Still didn't work with my main account too even though I've tried deleting my scripts (id:Pengguna:Bennylin/common.js and id:Pengguna:Bennylin/monobook.js). Strange... Bennylin (talk) 12:02, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced pop-up
Unfortunately this was a one-time issue I can't reproduce: the pop-up was misplaced, half hidden in the top left corner of the screen. This can be easily avoided by limiting the top and left position to positive integers. (With something like Math.max(0, x).) --TMg 15:17, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Are you facing issue like, http://i.imgur.com/QLyM4sI.png here? --KartikMistry (talk) 15:31, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, exactly. It seems this is independent from the browser. Possible explanation: Parts of the menu on the left side collapse on page load. This may confuse the code that calculates the position of the pop-up. --TMg 14:31, 15 March 2014 (UTC)
 * same her (latest chrome, mac os). --Sebaso (talk) 08:17, 16 March 2014 (UTC)
 * This looks bad. Not exactly sure what's causing the issue. Will look into it as soon as possible. Thanks for reporting this. --Niharika (talk)

Source code?
Where is the source code of this thing? --TMg 16:19, 22 March 2014 (UTC)
 * --Nemo 17:30, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

Accept-Language header
HTTP has an Accept-Language header. Is this used? For those who have configured it, it lists languages which the user should like to be offered. Where a default is offered, it is probably a language the user knows at least to some extent. Using the information is no privacy problem, as the information is there already (and a browser could choose to send the information only to trusted sites). --LPfi (talk) 15:09, 24 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Accept-language header is used. I just checked to tweak it from the browser and the new language I added was appearing. Please, let us know if it is not working in your case. --Pginer (talk) 16:21, 24 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I thought it was not mentioned in the documentation. Now I see it. --LPfi (talk) 11:59, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

my comments
sorry but for now i don't like it. shortening the list is one thing but a smart selector is another. maybe after working on the problems it'll be helpful.
 * in general i like seeing the plenty of languages and if there's place i say show the more - its a beauty :)

specific problems/bugs:
 * i cant reach the other languages - the rest of the list - '...' button doesn't work 99% of the time
 * when jumping to another wiki i get the old version, a different display. so beside a short list it adds nothing.
 * for now the selector has no 'sense' of my preferences. and i dont think it'll really have one, cause beside English i check other languages rarely and for different reasons and needs (for example i read also french but its not on my list, but i guess i checked the German wiki as often so...). or the cause might be my privacy settings?
 * The selector haven't got enough data thats sure - shows me afrikaans after english, arabic below that - no logic... so i guess it smart to recognize i read english and beside that its an annoying forced cut or is it something else? im an israeli - might be a relevant data.

GL, Dalilonim (talk) 14:57, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

More languages
The search should also show minor languages like Cree, Cantonese, etc. --Hmmfery (talk) 02:26, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
 * What makes you think that it doesn't? Works for me, e.g. on . --Nemo 06:58, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Half-hidden in hebrew.
I use the Opera Next browser v21.

Something in this beta feature is incompatible with edit button styling in Fixed header / Winter experimental beta feature
http://imgur.com/pbdD1NK This is currently only enabled on beta labs, but I need to fix it sooner rather than later. Any idea what might be causing this? Any way the styling could be limited to the left menu? Jdlrobson (talk) 21:35, 28 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi, I'm not sure what's causing this issue. Could you point me the JS/CSS files you're using for the button styling? I'd like to see if the elements share any class/id by mistake. I'm just guessing here. Niharika (talk) 12:56, 29 March 2014 (UTC)

Not working with SidebarTranslate
This beta feature is incompatible with gadget SidebarTranslate.--Wikiuser13 (talk) 13:21, 2 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks for pointing this out. I'll work on it. Adding it to Known Issues list. Niharika (talk) 17:46, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Related thread there, at en:User talk:Equazcion/SidebarTranslate. (No response, just a note of the bug). –Quiddity (talk) 19:47, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

I don't like it.
I prefer the old desing and I spent some time to switch off the new. Ich mag die alte Form lieber, und mußte lange suchen bis ich auf die alte Form zurückschalten konnte. --Steiger4 (talk) 15:20, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't like it, neither. --Daniele Pugliesi (talk) 20:33, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your feedback. We would like to get some more details on the issues you have with the tool when selecting your language. It would be very useful if you could gave us an example of what you were trying to achieve, in which context (e.g, article, whether the language you look for is a common language you access frequently or is it spoken in your region...), and how showing all languages in a plain list would help to make things easier in your context. Thanks. Pginer-WMF (talk) 18:03, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

Not for me
I found this tool very confusing, usefulness and time-wasting, so I switched it off. If someone like it, please leave it like an option that can be activated in the preference, but never by default. --Daniele Pugliesi (talk) 20:51, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your feedback. We would like to get some more details on the issues you have with the tool in order to select your desired language. It would be very useful if you could gave us an example of what you were trying to achieve, in which context (e.g, article, whether the language you look for is a common language you access frequently or is it spoken in your region...), and how showing all languages in a plain list would help to make things easier in your context. Thanks Pginer-WMF (talk) 17:59, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

比较差
（中文）输入法有跳字现象还有模板只能自己去找，引用里新闻用不了，提示模块未建立. 模板不能编辑.

Confusing
As far as I'm concerned, it's much harder to find a language with this feature. You need to scroll down through the whole world, so it's confusing. It's much easier to have it sorted alphabetically. VS6507 (talk) 13:46, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

Is anything happening with this feature?
Is anyone carrying about this getting into live form? – Oxmaster (talk) 16:10, 15 July 2014 (UTC)
 * The project is active but it is not a high priority project so I expect code updates to take some time. Most of the code for the feature was created by a volunteer participating on the OPW program. She is still involved but I expect development to happen at a slower pace compared to when the OPW program was still active. The project falls under the area of the Language Engineering team which has already helped in the development and may continue to do so in the future but is busy working on a high priority project as Content Translation.

In addition, considering that the tool is already useful in its current state, and that it heavily depends on context (languages the article is available, user location...) having it being tested a longer period inside the beta features area does not seem a bad thing. --Pginer-WMF (talk) 18:16, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

Unclear what this tool does
Thanks to the developers for working on this tool.

However, I'm not exactly clear on what it does or how to use it. I've selected the tool to use, and I'm given a list of language that are apparently "relevant to me", but I can't find any way to customise it. Browsing through the above, it seems that this is determined by what languages are spoken in a region. I guess if the tool were renamed then that would make sense. Otherwise some degree of customization would be appreciated.

That said, I know the WMF is rationalising its approach to development, and focusing on tools that are more immediate and useful. I would also strongly support if this tool were closed down and the efforts of developers moved to other activities. --LT910001 (talk) 09:50, 6 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Hello, the page currently described the customisation feature as follows: «When a language from the "more" list of languages is selected, it should become more prominent the next time by appearing on the initial list of languages.» Is this unclear? Does it not match what you're seeing? Would you place it somewhere else in the page?
 * The default selection ("How does Universal Language Selector determine which languages I may understand?") is explained by the second bullet in the first section so I'm not sure why you had to scan this long talk page instead. Suggestions and edits appreciated to make it clearer.
 * As for prioritisation, this is/was a GSoC project and currently most time spent on it comes from volunteers like me and its original author Niharika: certainly the WMF is not over-investing on it. :-) --Nemo 10:30, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Ah, I see! It's clear you've put a lot of effort into it, and I think for most users this tool is very useful. Unfortunately a while ago I trawled the interwikis looking for GAs that I could machine-translate to see how other languages deal with my topic area (anatomy), so I have some rather odd languages (for me) stuck there. That said thanks for being so prompt about replying and I do recognise you've put a lot of work into this. --LT910001 (talk) 23:57, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Why not flow here?!
--Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 12:24, 15 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I've read that it was introduced here (mediawikiwiki) for new talk pages at some date in 2014, but this is an old talk page (2013). After about 30 minutes trying to figure out where exactly I read this I gave up, maybe it wasn't on mediawikiwiki, but an engineering report on meta, or the MW blog. –Be..anyone (talk) 15:20, 15 November 2014 (UTC)

Disabled?
and others: Why this beta feature has been disabled in the English Wikipedia? I noticed it's missing from the Beta tab, although the feature was working for me. After disabling all Betas to find out what's happening, it's not working anymore. I think it was a really essential feature especially on pages which have more than 100 interwiki links.

If the beta feature was disbanded just like the compact personal bar due to "end of funding", it's a major disappointment. Betas are being run for more than a year and then just given up on. --Pudeo (talk) 02:25, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
 * It will be back soon(https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T105795), we are fixing a regressoion that cause it unlisted from beta features. --Santhosh.thottingal (talk) 14:42, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the heads up. --Pudeo (talk) 01:16, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

Labels look like links but aren't
Please make the blue labels in the UI actual links I can open by clicking the middle mouse button, for example. --TMg 15:17, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the feedback. You are right, links on the language list should be real links. I've added this to the list of issues to be fixed. --Pginer (talk) 16:01, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

Two more things. For the extra interwikis, I can't middle click or Ctrl+click the link to open in a new tab too. [...] Bennylin (talk) 13:32, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I split your message across the two sections which deal with it. This one is tracked at 64797. --Nemo 20:37, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Interwiki titles
One of the good thing of having the old interwikis are for comparing titles between 'pedias. For example in the name of a person, does the majority of 'pedias use X or Y, or in the name of species, Latin or common, or geographic entities. Therefore reducing them to select few limits this functionality. Even after the "..." button is clicked, user still can't see the titles in other 'pedias (not even in mouse hover). A Wikidata-like list would be very useful, and an improvement over the old interwikis.

Also, can we select the short-list through our preferences? The autodetect isn't functioning properly; for example it tend to shows ar.wp and af.wp (alphabetical?), where I would prefer ms.wp and fr.wp. Bennylin (talk) 12:10, 18 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your feedback. I added a new issue in our list about preserving the title information on language links. That would make the new language links to behave closer to the current ones. The auto-detect functionality not working is already a known issue, and there is already a fix for it in progress, so it should be working soon. --Pginer (talk) 10:09, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

Besides the articles title being shown in the links pop-up title also remember to restore the translated language name to be shown in the pop-up title that was added this year (5231) – also in the pop-up language select. --Patrick87 (talk) 21:15, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
 * The localised title on hover is working for me. --Nemo 19:22, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Badges
It looks like the Compact Interlanguage links feature doesn't display the badges in the articles? I'm not sure whether this was always the case, or it is a consequence of the new Wikidata feature.--Qgil (talk) 08:35, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
 * "Bug 64797 - [Interlanguage links] Collapsed language links should be actual  elements"?--Qgil (talk) 18:37, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Actually not, I was told, because badges apply styles to the li elements. Asking on . --Nemo 07:30, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Bold on Kazakh Wikipedia
This page says "Kazakh wiki shows inter-language links for English and Russian in bold" and gives an example. But with the migration to Wikidata, that example doesnt show English and Russian in bold. Does anyone have a screenshot of that, or know how it was implemented (Common.css/js?) Is there a plan to add bold as a feature? John Vandenberg (talk) 05:56, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

Line height
The gray text at the bottom breaks in certain languages. For example in German it says "20 weitere

Sprachen" with a much to big line-height. --TMg 15:17, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I've tried the Obama article with "195 weitere Sprachen" and it fits on the small window sizes for both Chrome and Firefox with and without the typography refresh, so I could not reproduce that (is there any beta feature / gadget that could be affecting this n your case?). One of the plans for the future is to integrate the label into the button with a shorter text ("X languages") which should reduce the issues. In any case we'll also need to review the line height for those cases that text requires a new line. --Pginer (talk) 16:14, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
 * The line break is not the problem. It can't be avoided in all languages. The line height is wrong. --TMg 14:06, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

Search functionality obfuscated
The search box at the top of the UI doesn't look like a search box. It looks like a headline. The only hint that you can type something is the blinking text cursor. This is bad for usability. And it's strange since the same UI element in the ULS language selection actually does look like an input field (example screen shot). It does have a border. This one does not. --TMg 15:17, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Apart from the blinking cursor, the magnifying glass icon and the "search languages" placeholder text help to identify this as a search bar. The decision of avoiding too many boxes is to try to simplify the UI (the search bar occupies all the space on top becoming the main entry point since the map is not used here and it is more closely connected to the list of languages that it filters). During our tests with users we found no issues identifying and using the search bar, but we'll keep paying attention to it. --Pginer (talk) 16:26, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I can't believe this. This is oversimplifying. Microsoft tried the same in a lot of places in Windows 8 and failed horribly. Nobody understood he can simply start typing without having an input field. Did you told your test users there is a filter functionality or did they found it without knowing it is there? Users are looking for search boxes. That's why every search engine still uses a small input field with a clearly visible border. But in this case there simply is no search box. Neither the icon nor the text make it clear that the list can be filtered by typing. Both look like labels for the pop-up (that's the purpose of the pop-up, to "search for a language", right?). The Winter experiment does have the same major design flaw. And the main question remains: Why do think it's a good idea to make every UI (the Beta checkboxes, the new Special:Search, and basically every pop-up in every extension recently developed by the WMF) look different? I once learned being consistent is a major aspect in usability. --TMg 14:27, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

"More" shouldn't show same languages again
I expected the "..." button to show what it says: more languages. Instead it's like it shows the same languages again (with the completely generic headline "Sprachen" in German), plus some more. I find this confusing. Are these two selections of "common" languages based on two different assumptions? --TMg 15:17, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
 * There are a couple of aspects to consider here. The initial list is supposed to be very short, so the first section of the language list ("Common languages") will leave more room for languages the user is interested in. The reason for keeping the initial languages also on the language list is to allow the language list to be able to find all languages. This is useful if you overlook a language in the initial list or went directly to the more languages list due to muscle memory. Having said that, I can imagine that for cases where there are few languages in addition to those in the main list, the "Common languages" section could possibly be skipped. I'll add a note on the future explorations for adapting the language list to few items. --Pginer (talk) 16:43, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I understand and agree that having the "commons" section in the pop-up is probably a good idea. But it should be the same as the languages in the sidebar. Currently it's almost the same, sometimes with one or two more languages, sometimes with one or two missing, sometimes almost empty with a single language only. I don't see the benefit of this. It feels like it's random (the user can not understand the rules from comparing the two lists). And as I said the headline of the "commons" section is bad in German but I couldn't find the message (?uselang=qqx is ignored for some reason). PS: Found it. --TMg 14:42, 15 March 2014 (UTC)
 * If you take a look at the testing recordings, users were asked the following: "Could you search for the 'Mona Lisa' article, and access it in Spanish, Dutch, French and Russian" (you can see the tester box on the top-right area of the screen). They were asked to access the article in different languages which aligns with the user goal regardless of the technical means provided to do so. Those were part of some tests done through usertesting.com. On one-on-one tests with users we followed a similar script (but also asking a more open version of the question initially: "access the languages you know"). In that case, we were able to have a conversation and ask why users made use of the different entry points, and even the users that didn't used search seemed to be aware of the search capability. Once the "known issues" section gets reduced, I'll plan some tests for the current feature. Then, we could check again if the problem appears. --Pginer (talk) 09:43, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

It keeps annoying me.
The … button stands out too much, distracting from the rest of the page. Please remove it, and instead make the " n more languages" text clickable. Keφr 19:48, 15 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Oppose. I love this extremely simple button with no text. Please keep it and don't make it bigger by switching the "…" with text. --TMg 11:26, 16 March 2014 (UTC)
 * My reflect was to click the 73 more languages instead of the ellipses. Bennylin (talk) 12:16, 18 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Me too. I was somehow subconsciously confused by the "…" at first sight which I think is a bad sign regarding UI design and usability. When clicking "…" I was even more confused since I would have expected the hidden languages to be somehow unfolded (as normally when three dots are used to omit sth. somewhere) but surely not a new UI dialog to pop up. I'd favor the proposed solution below (incorporate number of languages into a button) which will actually make the UI less distracting in my opinion (by saving one UI element). --Patrick87 (talk) 21:06, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
 * There is a benefit in having an entry point for switching languages that is understood in any language, but it is also true that the indicator of the total length could be understood as the entry point. We have explored several solutions:


 * Integrate both (example design) . While keeping the universal icon and avoiding the multiple-entry point problem, the main entry point becomes slightly more complex than it was.
 * Make the "X more languages" also to act as an entry point. Although it could make it work for users that click on it, having two separate entrypoints for the same thing next to each other seems not to be the best solution.
 * Remove the "X more languages", if the "..." is enough to indicate that there are more languages, do we need the specific number? While it is not strictly needed (it is not provided with the current language links), I think it communicates the multilingualism of our project and helps to answer a reasonable question ("in how many languages is the article available?") easier than what we currently are able to. I prefer to keep this info but I'm open to present it in a different way (popup? as part of the search field placeholder?). ---Pginer (talk) 09:58, 19 March 2014 (UTC)
 * The number is totally misleading. Because the extra interwikis are presented per continent basis (in itself is a bit problematic), some languages occur several times in several continents, i.e. France, English, Nederlands, etc. When it said 5 links, I expect to see the 5 links that were not in the short list, instead I get the full list, with the aforementioned redundancies. Bennylin (talk)
 * The list of languages was initially designed to select from all languages, addapting it to work well with fewer languages is something in our todo list (more details on the "Adapt the list of languages to accommodate a reduced number of languages" point on the "Suggestions for improvement" section) --Pginer (talk) 07:48, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

I would like it if the x more Languages would simply expand into a list of the remaining Languages.--Saehrimnir (talk) 18:22, 25 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I was looking at this again today, and I agree with the above comments. The button is adding to the visual clutter. Three dots don't tell me much regarding what kind of action i'm performing and "35 more languages" IS telling me something, but is not an actionable element... Something is still way off here... —Th e DJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 11:39, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I agree to the comments in this discussion, too. In fact I would like to click the "more languages" and I strongly prefer a list in alphabetical order, that is more rational and easy. In fact the list "by continent" it is misleading and confusing. "Pacific" and "Middle East" for example are not continents. In conclusion, the only good thing of this "tool" is that it is more compact that the normal view, but when I clicked the "..." I had very bad thoughts about developers. --Daniele Pugliesi (talk) 20:39, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Screenshots for the docs
Hi. Please add some screenshots to the project page, so that we can see the various components in action. Thanks :) –Quiddity (talk) 16:17, 12 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi. Will do that. Thanks! NiharikaKohli (talk) 03:59, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

middle click on languages doesn't work
All links required to be real "a" HTML links, so middle mouse button click can work (to open in new window). -- Vlsergey (talk) 09:13, 19 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Hello. This issue has been fixed now and is in the process of deployment. It should be in effect within a couple of days. Thanks. :) Niharika (talk) 13:19, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

wikidata
On wikidata I somehow managed that I can only see descriptions in languages listed in a #babel: box on my user page. So when I wanted to check a Cyril description I just added ru-0, and could check the Russian description on Q223535. Please blank, revert, or move this section if it is off topic here. –Be..anyone (talk) 00:03, 10 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, Wikidata relies on ULS, but also has some hacky customisations which I think will be eventually removed. See also T88284 and T86191. --Nemo 08:08, 10 February 2015 (UTC)