I'll go ahead and throw this out there—we should consider sorting alphabetically instead of or in addition to sorting by language count. If you aren't familiar with the rough size of the Wikipedia for the language you are looking for, you have no idea where to look. Ctrl+F works on desktop, but searching within a page is awkward on mobile. Basic navigation features like jumping to/near a particular letter in the sorted list would be very helpful. How to sort non-Latin characters needs to be thought through, but there's precedent in the way things are sorted in the Languages list on the left of every wiki page or the sorted list in the search box on the portal page. I suppose another option would be typing in the language name and getting a type-ahead match. Anyway, sorting by Wikipedia size doesn't seem user friendly to me.
Topic on Talk:Wikipedia.org updated page layout/Flow
I agree that we should re-think the groupings and hierarchy.
Very good points on the usability issues of the current grouping & hierarchy.
First off I'd like to point out that the language links are actually already sorted in alphabetical order -- within their current grouping.
The sorting of the language links can therefor be described as: grouped by article-count, and then sorted alphabetically within that group (I think everyone can agree that this sorting scheme is rather unintuitive).
Since the language links are already sorted alphabetically within their groupings, I think it's worth looking at the groupings themselves.
An alternative to grouping the links by article-count (as I think TJones suggests) would be to group languages by their first letter, like in an index, from A-Z. This approach poses some technical challenges with non-latin scripts, but it is feasible. However, out of the 300-ish languages on the page, about 95 are non-latin. For these languages, grouping them under a foreign alphabet character doesn't seem like the most intuitive solution either.
I personally like how the Universal Language Selector widget groups languages by region, so that languages from a similar geographic area are grouped together. It makes more sense for me to see, for example, east asian languages grouped together than it does to see Japanese (Nihongo) under an 'N' heading and Chinese (Zhōngwén) under 'Z'.
The Universal Language selector widget can be see here: https://translatewiki.net/ and then selecting "choose another language". Thanks, @JDrewniak (WMF) and @TJones (WMF). I opened a ticket in the backlog for testing out sorting the languages by alphabetical listing: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T139311 using two slightly different looks.
Hello, I think that selecting the compact list of languages by article count is a terrible idea. Cebuano is 3rd and Waray is 10th, but these Wikipedia versions have few readers and editors.
The list should consider the number of active editors and the number of visitors. Also, as I said in other threads here, it should also consider the web browser's list of languages sent by the URL query.
Hello,
Do you mean that with your settings you see Cebuano in the list around the Wikipedia globe? Or in the dropdown?
I mean the dropdown list. It has about 50 languages, including Waray (2.6 million speakers, 75 active users) and Volapük (artificial language, 28 active users), but not Greek (13 million speakers, 800 active users) or Bengali (200 million speakers, 500 active users)
Hi,
Are you refering to the new dropdown we want to show on the wikipedia.org portal page? It contains all the same language links we currently have on that page.