[Mediawiki-i18n] Making inter-language links shorter

[Pau Giner]

As multilingual content grows, interlanguage links become longer on
Wikipedia articles. Articles such as "Barak Obama" or "Sun" have more than
200 links, and that becomes a problem for users that often switch among
several languages.

As part of the future plans for the Universal Language Selector, we were
considering to:

   - Show only a short list of the relevant languages for the user based on
   geo-IP, previous choices and browser settings of the current user. The
   language the users are looking for will be there most of the times.
   - Include a "more" option to access the rest of the languages for which
   the content exists with an indicator of the number of languages.
   - Provide a list of the rest of the languages that users can easily scan
   (grouped by script and region ao that alphabetical ordering is possible),
   and search (allowing users to search a language name in another language,
   using ISO codes or even making typos).

I have created a prototype <http://pauginer.github.io/prototype-uls/#lisa> to
illustrate the idea. Since this is not connected to the MediaWiki backend,
it lacks the advanced capabilities commented above but you can get the idea.
If you are interested in the missing parts, you can check the flexible
search and the list of likely languages ("common languages" section) on the
language selector used at http://translatewiki.net/ which is connected to
MediaWiki backend.

As part of the testing process for the ULS language settings, I included a
task to test also the compact interlanguage designs. Users seem to
understand their use (view
recording<https://www.usertesting.com/highlight_reels/qPYxPW1aRi1UazTMFreR>),
but I wanted to get some feedback for changes affecting such an important
element.

Please let me know if you see any possible concern with this approach.

Thanks


-- 
Pau Giner
Interaction Designer
Wikimedia Foundation
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