Improved Wikipedia Zero Landing Page

in progress outline Akapoor (WMF) (talk) 23:47, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

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 however. 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 core 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 people in these countries 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 special 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 customized landing page with language selection. We only do this for Wikipedia Zero, but it may make sense to apply to all of Wikipedia 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.

The downside of this page....