Improved Wikipedia Zero Landing Page

Language redirection on mobile currently
One of the greatest feats of Wikipedia is that it exists in 280+ languages. Currently, on Wikipedia's mobile site however, all readers are directed to en.m.wikipedia.org (English) if they enter wikipedia.org in their browser. This is a missed opportunity, and in some cases a poor user experience, for non-English speakers or anyone in which English is not their primary language.

Wikipedia Zero as a testbed
Wikipedia Zero is one of the core programs intended to drive readership growth of Wikipedia. One of the main assumptions of Wikipedia Zero is that a large percentage of people in developing countries are using their mobile phone as their primary - or sometimes only - means to access the internet, and Wikipedia. A very high percentage of these same people do not speak English either, so in order for Wikipedia Zero to succeed, we need to drive awareness to these new readers that Wikipedia exists in their native language.

To achieve this, we've enabled a customized landing page for Wikipedia Zero readers (ie, customers of the mobile operator we have partnered with). When our servers detect if traffic is coming from a partner's IP address range, we serve up a country-specific landing page with language selection. We only do this for Wikipedia Zero, but it may make sense to apply to entire countries later on. Hence, Wikipedia Zero is a great testbed for the future of language selection on all of Wikipedia mobile.

Why not just redirect to local language?
This comes up a lot as an idea. For example, if we detect someone is in Egypt, we should just serve up the Arabic Wikipedia mobile home page. This is a partial solution, and in some cases would work, but we generally cannot do it because many countries do not have a dominant reading language (meaning over 90% of people have the same first choice of language) and several countries have a large number of local languages (eg India). In the future, it may be possible for us to redirect to whatever language we detect are in the phone's settings, but that's a separate issue, and also only a partial solution.

The Wikipedia Zero Landing page now
The landing page is pretty well summarized on the Wikipedia Zero Media Wiki page. The most important features of it to note are:
 * It contains a search box in the most commonly used language in the country.
 * There are anywhere from 2-7 links to other language homepages on the page. These, as well as their order, are jointly decided based on usage data and the in-country partner's direction.

This page, as it is, achieves our goal, but the downside is it's not engaging. It requires the reader to take action (either searching or clicking on a language link) without giving them any sample content. For first time readers especially, this can be a problem as they need to be softly introduced to what wikipedia has to offer.

Improving the page
We'd like to see if there is a way to improve the page to be more engaging while preserving its diversity of selection. Meaning, it should ideally (a) give some sort of sample content up front and (b) still provide the diversity of language selection. We'd like to have people look at the problem from both a design and technology perspective.

Ideas
To get the process going, we have started with two ideas, but are absolutely not limited to them. These are meant just as a guide. Note the ideas mention today's featured article as (in my understanding) this is the most common template across languages.

These two ideas use the as an example:

Show two lines of today's featured article for up to 3 languages, and text links for any remaining "secondary" languages.

Move the drop down language selector box to be included in the free access banner, and the content of the page would then include today's featured articles for two pages. The languages in the dropdown would then be limited to the ones that are chosen as secondary languages.

Constraints (musts)
This is not an easy task as there are lot of constraints that we must uphold:


 * 1) The page must work well on simple devices (eg, lower-end Nokia and Android phones). Wikipedia Zero is designed to appeal to people who can't otherwise afford access so presumably to not have iPhones, Blackberry, Samsung, etc.
 * 2) The page must not depend on images. Around half of Wikipedia Zero partners only offer access to the zero.wikipedia.org version of the site, which does not support images.
 * 3) The page should support up to 8 languages.  Each one does not necessarily have to have content, but it must be simple at least to select one of these languages.  Remember that some languages are also LTR.
 * 4) The page needs to fit within the current architecture of the mobile Wikipedia site. Meaning the search box has to remain at the top.
 * 5) Mobile screens are small.  Just a reminder :)

To understand the diversity of languages we are trying to support, here is a sample of active Wikipedia Zero partners, and the respective languages they link to (anywhere from 2 to 8). The first language listed is the "primary" language (ie, language of the search box) and the ones following are the "secondary" languages. These only represent 10 of the 32 countries we have scheduled to launch in, but is a good representation. Sometimes the languages listed will vary from those on the link -- in those cases, trust the ones listed on the link:


 * Malaysia: English (en), Bahasa Melayu (ms), chinese (zh), Bahasa Indonesia (id)
 * Ivory Coast: English (en), Bambara (bm), Fulfulde (ff), Wolof (wo), Arabic (ar), Chinese (zh), Spanish (es), German (de)
 * Uganda: English (en), Swahili (sw), Kinyarwanda (rw), French (fr), German (de), Hindi (hi), Chinese (zh), Arabic (ar)
 * Tunisia: French (fr), Arabic (ar), English (en), Spanish (es), German (de), Italian (it)
 * Montenegro: English (en), Serbian Latin script (sr-el), Croatian (hr), Serbo-Croation (sh), Russian (ru), Bosnian (bs), German (de), Albanian (sq)
 * Niger: French (fr), English (en), Chinese (zh), Haoussa (ha), Arabic (ar), Peul (ff)
 * Cameroon: French (fr), English (en), Spanish (es), German (de), Chinese (zh), Arabic (ar), Hausa (ha)
 * Kenya: English (en), Swahili (sw), Kikuyu (ki), French (fr), German (de), Arabic (ar), Somali (so), Kongo (kg)
 * Saudi Arabia: Arabic (ar), English (en), Bengali (bn), Tagalog (tl)
 * Thailand: Thai (th), English (en), Japanese (jp), German (de), French (fr), Russian (ru), Italian (it), Swedish (sv)