For a long time Wikipedia was great because the community decided what content to show on a web-site. Not that "smart" google/facebookk-style algorythms that decide what a user wil see, but people, devoted to NPOV, full and free data. Now we are shifting towards digital slavery, spying for my geolocation and suggesting me something i do not want. Not the full & NPOV-content, but something prejudged.
Topic on Talk:Universal Language Selector/Compact Language Links
The notion that "before Google, The Internet was fair" is wrong. Whenever humans are confronted with a mass of information too large to process at a glance, they devise concepts and algorithms to tame that mass and make it human-processable. These algorithms are designed by humans to specifically distort "the original information" and carry a bit of subjectivity to them. The aim of Wikipedia cannot be "lets just dump all the information at a reader (like 200-language list)" but "lets present the most relevant information using algorithms that are WELL-INTENDED (as opposed e.g. to profit-optimized algorithms of Facebook)".
@Abiyoyo, your comment seems to imply that Compact Language links is only driven algorithmically without user or community intervention. However, human intervention is given priority in the languages shown more prominently to the user:
- Individual users can decide their preferred languages by selecting them. That is, a user navigating between Hindi and Punjabi, will have those two languages available in the short list. Previous choices is the criteria with a highest priority (since it is based on actual decisions by the user), it will not be overridden by other guesses.
- Browser accept languages are also considered. The user can configure those through the browser settings.
- Communities can define their list of closely related languages that will be taken into account to surface those, when there are no previous selections.
- Finally, other criteria such as location-related guesses are based on CLDR, an information repository open for contribution.
More details here.
Thank you, Pginer-WMF, Now i think my comment was a kind of overreacting and too harsh. Sorry for that. The future possibility to change the default interwiki lists for communities (T138973) is a kind of a solution. The other reason behind my comment was also the invisibility of "show other languages" button, which was broken due to css conflict in ru-wiki. The first impression was that other interwiki links were hidden completely. Now it is obvious that it was problem on local ru-wiki side.
I agree with OP, this option merely shuts off users from learning other/obscure languages.