Topic on Talk:Map improvements 2018/Flow

I tried the new features in testwiki and they are really cool! While trying and after reading the comments below, a simple question arises:

Is there any chance for, default or per wiki, arbitrary language fallbacks? As an example: english are not related with greek language. But greek readers when greek labels are missing on a map of China, would prefer to read english labels rather than chinese labels.

lang="en" would not be a solution as all labels would be in english.

To my understanding the feature exists, so it is only a matter of choice (or policy?).

Thanks for the question @Geraki. Would you want Greek maps in general to fall back on English? That could be done pretty easily, though it might require some kind of community consensus.

Know, though, that the fallback list for maps is separate from the general language fallback list for the wikis, which governs things like what languages interface messages get shown in. At the moment, the lists have the same fallback values. But my point is you could change the map-specific list without changing the main language fallback list. So changing the map list is probably not too hard.

Yes, if the technical team is ok with that, the community consensus will be certain. I will raise the matter for discussion on elwiki.

When you have a consensus, we will be happy to make the change.

At that time, if you know how, please fill out a Phabricator ticket and tag it to "Collaboration-Feature-Rollouts (Collaboration-Maps)". Or you can ping me.

The question of how to change fallbacks is bound to come up from other volunteers and languages. Perhaps @CKoerner (WMF) can comment on what process he'd recommend for such a change request (knowing, as I say above, that this is a map-specific change and would NOT change the general language fallbacks)?

The issue could be a bit more complex. For example, a Luxembourger will want to see name:fr over name:de in France and Luxembourg, but not in Germany, and not everywhere in Belgium.

Hi @Stereo. Yes, these issues can get tricky. There is good info and strategies on this in my posts about Should your wiki change its map fallback language? and also OSM name data quirks and the uses of lang="local".