Universal Language Selector/Design/Interlanguage links/Talk archive March 2014–April 2016

WORK IN PROGRESS

Archived conversations from Talk:Universal Language Selector/Design/Interlanguage links.

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)


 * How many language edition can it memorize automatically? I visit English, Chinese and Japanese Wikipedia nearly everyday, then I would occasionally visit Cantonese, Korean, Classical Chinese, Simple English Wikipedia a few time every month, and other wikipedia like German, French, Arabic, Wu, Min Nan, Vietnamese, Gan, Hakka, Thai and Min Dong Wikipedia are also some Wikipedia that I would visit from time to time. How to make it show all of these language variants that I would use there? The "Common Languages" section on top of the ULS seems to have even more problem as I would switch between Chinese, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese (Macau), and Chinese (Singapore), it's often that after i selected all of them one by one the language I originally were using would then already disappeared from the list. How to fix that?C933103 (talk) 09:17, 14 March 2016 (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)


 * Definitely not: there are several languages which I often read but never ever write in. --Heinrich Puschmann (talk) 09:07, 11 March 2016 (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)
 * Strongly agree, too --Heinrich Puschmann (talk) 09:15, 11 March 2016 (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)
 * Babel indication is misleading for that purpose. There are several languages I am able to read, but completely unable to write or contribute in. --Heinrich Puschmann (talk) 09:38, 11 March 2016 (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)
 * Ever heard of the user's laziness to change default settings? I kept the setting in order to responsibly participate in this discussion. But with such a kind of argument I am now forced to switch it off in order to mean what I say. I still fail to understand why Wikimedia wishes to avoid by all means that people choose their preferred languages. --Heinrich Puschmann (talk) 09:38, 11 March 2016 (UTC)