Comments on: Internationalisation team updates on Universal Language Selector and Project Milkshake

By: Srikanth Lakshmanan

Srikanth Lakshmanan — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 08:27:32 +0000

Thanks everyone for your comments.

@Kenneth The idea of grouping languages into regions is that people will be able to identify them easily as speakers will anyway know the geographical origin of the language.

As for the two letter codes, We shall have it display complete region name once it is ready for internationalization.

@Kenneth, @Neilk,
We don’t have prioritized search ranking now and at some point are thinking of GeoIP based suggestions on ULS which might satisfy large number of users to change language without searching.

By: NeilK

NeilK — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 00:12:47 +0000

Does language popularity matter at all in the search ranking? I understand the desire to be egalitarian, but I think this might be affecting usability too much. I feel there ought to be quicker ways to find English, German, Chinese, etc… I assume you are going to test those?

By: Stultus

Stultus — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 19:13:46 +0000

@Kenneth Languages are grouped by writing system.not by geography.

By: bawolff

bawolff — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 18:29:10 +0000

“The two-letter codes which appear at the top of the language region groupings would be better spelled out (in the same language as the map labels), as they are in some cases quite cryptic right now (eg, “AF” for Africa).”

+1 I spend a good minute figuring out NA stood for north america instead of not applicable.

By: Kenneth

Kenneth — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 16:38:39 +0000

Grouping languages by geography to me just seems fundamentally wrong. Many people today live in territories where they speak a language other than the officially recognized languages for those territories. It also results in a lot of duplication – eg, English practically everywhere.

If you are going to go with this approach though:
- Would it make sense to show languages within a region grouped first by popularity (measured by whatever metric you like)? If I click Europe, I expect to see English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Polish first, not a bunch of relatively small languages, all of which use the Cyrillic alphabet.
- The two-letter codes which appear at the top of the language region groupings would be better spelled out (in the same language as the map labels), as they are in some cases quite cryptic right now (eg, “AF” for Africa).