[Mediawiki-i18n] mdot webroot redirects on Wikipedia Zero

[Minh Nguyen]

On 2014-11-25 13:27, Adam Baso wrote:
> Federico, you're right - www.wikipedia.org/ <http://www.wikipedia.org/>
> gets a lot more traffic than m.wikipedia.org/ <http://m.wikipedia.org/>;
> www.wikipedia.org/ <http://www.wikipedia.org/> skews more toward
> English, for several reasons, but it still seems like wiring up a
> JavaScript widget to talk to an API that examines the Accept-Languages,
> or something like that, might be useful for multilingual users and users
> not reading a language listed toward the top of the page. I'm currently
> pretty busy, but we could maybe at least ask Mxn (if not on this list)
> what Mxn thinks, as Mxn has been pretty involved with the global
> Wikipedia portal template.

The portals currently use navigator.languages/.language/.userLanguage to 
have the search box default to the first Accept-Language language. I 
would certainly be open to having the portal react more noticeably to 
this value, for instance by dynamically placing it in the top 10 ring, 
displacing one of the larger wikis. Any change in behavior is going to 
need approval from the Meta community at least, but that shouldn't stop 
us from trying.

If OTOH the suggestion is to immediately redirect to the indicated 
language edition, I'd want to see statistics on the percentage of 
Wikipedia visitors whose Accept-Language or UI language actually matches 
their home wiki. I suspect that many just leave it set to their 
operating system language, which doesn't necessarily match their 
favorite wiki. It's one thing for mdot to redirect, because mobile users 
would be less interested in a landing page with tiny links. But if the 
main portal redirects, we'll quickly get flak for being too [insert 
language]-centric.

> Should I BCC Mxn on this thread, or email Mxn
> off-thread? Mxn tries to avoid spam from what I can tell on Mxn's
> personal website.

My resistance has been futile so far. :-\

-- 
Minh Nguyen <mxn at 1ec5.org>
[[User:Mxn]]