... we do not want "5 cm" of language links + some translation info box on the main page. We can cheerfully leave them at the bottom. It looks like we are currently facing an edit war here.
Topic on Template talk:Main page
Edit war indeed. @Want I agree strongly with @TheDJ and @Kghbln that having the large translated language descriptor at the top of this page is undesirable. I agree with your initial edit comment that top placement is common, but I'm not sure I understand It was problematically inserting the bar of languages to the bottom border of the page. Can you help us all reach a mutually agreeable solution here by expanding on the problematic aspects of this placement so we can see if we can address those concerns?
If anonymus user use a phone, or browser window narrower, is language bar out of it. In header of page is only active link to language selector, but It can't switch. Doesn't that sound like enough of a reason?
Next. Language bar in bottom do link to page 'Template:Main page', not 'MediaWiki' (mainpage)
And finally. It's only temporary solution. The multilingual switch can be solved differently for the new skin if be apply.
I intensive work on template which solve multilanguage of links, because template Languages is old, and only supply element '<languages />'
I do slowly, in parts because I have to deal with the work for which I am paid in parallel. I am not an fulltime employee of WMF.
I do slowly, in parts because I have to deal with the work for which I am paid in parallel. I am not an fulltime employee of WMF.
I apologize if somehow I gave you the impression that your work to support the MediaWiki community is unwelcome. I generally feel like I should be the lowest status person in these sorts of discussions exactly because I am one of the few people who do get paid to help advance the projects.
As @P858snake says below, Perhaps we could workshop this on a /sandbox subpage first? The major redesign of MediaWiki that I was previously involved with used MediaWiki/Homepage improvements 2018/Proposal as the working draft until there was consensus that the new design was working well enough to replace the prior MediaWiki. The changes you are attempting are not as visually and structurally different, but they are experimental as far as I understand from the related discussion in Topic:Y8l01lc8uein5fng. Is it possible to work in a draft or sandbox page of some kind so that you can experiment as needed and get feedback from others before applying the changes to Template:Main page?
If we have to, we could do something like Commons does where they manually curate a list of links to the translations so that they have fine grained control over styling.
Commons has to use a manually curated listed because its main page doesn’t use the Translate extension, and thus the main pages’ titles are unpredictable. Those of mediawiki.org are predictable, so I don’t think a manually curated list is warranted. A custom template+module solution, which formats the list differently than the standard solutions, but still displays an automatically generated (standard) list, may make sense, though.
See also https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Y8l01lc8uein5fng
Perhaps we could workshop this on a /sandbox subpage first?
Do we want to fold this less-discoverable thread into the one of the Village pump?
Having one discussion seems like a good idea to me. Is there any magic way to merge across flow boards? Or should we just close this with a pointer to the other?
Sadly, just close this with a pointer. I'll do that now.