this request/idea was raised in hewiki technical village pump.
the requested feature is to allow users to define "preferred language". when hovering above a link, where the linked article has interwiki to this preferred language, the hovercard content will be generated by the "preferred language" wikipdia rather than the local one, and natually, it will also link there.
peace.
Sorry- This sounds interesting, but I am having trouble understanding what is being proposed. Can you show an example? Thanks!
i will try to explain the behavior and illustrate a use case to justify the the rationale, at the same time:
Judy has language skills of de-N and en-4.
since enwiki has more articles than dewiki, there must be at least one article in enwiki with no interwiki in German. (say, en:Marauna abati ). for one reason or another, Judy reads this article.
this article has internal link to en:Beetle, which *does* have dewiki interlink: de:Käfer (it's even a featured article!) Judy would prefer to get the hovercards for de:Käfer, instead of en:Beetle when she hovers above "beetle".
She is willing to "pay the price" of slightly longer wait for the extra api call when hovering above a link ( action=query&list=langlinks&lllang=de&titles=Beetle , receive "Käfer", then execute the call to build the hovercard against dewiki. if langlink does not return any article in dewiki, build the hovercard by calling the local wiki, same as it's done now. this is one extra api call over present workflow).
use global preferences (meta? or maybe clicking the little gear symbol on the hovercard?), so Judy can get the same behavior on frwiki (Judy has fr-3 skills), arwiki, fawiki, and even fiwiki (she uses google translate to occasionally read articles in Finnish).
small extension of the above will allow Judy to say "whichever wp i read, give me the dewiki article if there is one, otherwise the one from enwiki, if this doesn't exist then frwiki, and none of those interwikis exist, give me the local hovercard"
of course, if such substitution occurred, the hovercard will also *link* to the target wiki, so judy can decide if she wants to read "beetle" on enwiki by clicking the link, or Käfer on dewiki by clicking on the hovercard.
i hope i did not bore you by this long and tedious explanation - apparently the short and succint i was going for with the original message was not clear...
peace.
That is really helpful and a use case I, at least, had not thought of. On the one hand, this would be tremendously useful. On the other hand, it might be very confusing for users who then see different languages on hovers while on a single Wiki and for whom the hovercard behavior changes. From a cleanliness perspective I am not a fan, but it sounds like it could be really valuable to everyone who reads more than 1 language.
I created a ticket for it to gather other input: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T129909
