English: The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development, and distribution of free, multilingual, educational content. WMF operates Wikipedia, a project to build free encyclopedias in all languages of the world. For the Discovery Department's Portal team (tasked with making the wikipedia.org a more engaging and friendlier portal to free knowledge), it is important that all visitors, regardless of language, receive a more welcoming experience.

On 17 March 2016 we deployed a patch to Wikipedia Portal to log all user preferred languages. We found that approximately 70% of Wikipedia Portal visitors only have English as their preferred language, and approx. 18% set a language other than English. Around 12% of our users are multilingual (according to their browser preferences), but many of those included English.

Users whose primary language is English or who included English as a preferred language clicked through and searched at a remarkably higher rate on a daily basis than users whose primary language is another language (60% vs 50% and 50% vs 30%), but the latter group used the language links at a much higher rate than the former (10% vs 20%).

In fact, English-speaking visitors' overall clickthrough rate was 12.5%-14.4% higher than non-English-speaking visitors', and were 1.3 times more likely to click through, indicating, perhaps, that increased localization efforts could better engage our non-English-speaking visitors. Based on the data and patterns observed, we strongly support and encourage the language detection and localization efforts the Portal team has begun pursuing.