Community Wishlist/Wishes/Pin unpin specific languages/en
Description
It can be difficult to quickly find languages relevant to you from the list of language versions. The Compact Language Links feature is supposed to solve this, but ironically it makes it even more difficult so I've disabled it globally. Currently, there are three ways for a user to make specific languages appear in the abbreviated list. All have serious problems:
- One way is to configure your browser's language preferences. But more often than not, the reason you want to see a page in a certain language isn't necessarily that you comprehend that language; it just means you suspect that language version might have information you're seeking that can be extracted even if you're not fluent in it. Not only that, just because you want to visit certain language versions of WMF projects doesn't mean you want to read other sites in those languages, let alone tell every website you visit that you understand them, which has serious privacy concerns because it enables them to fingerprint you more easily.
- Another is to list languages in a Babel box on your user page. This has similar problems: The reason you want to read certain language versions isn't necessarily that you understand them, and you have to publicly state your language skills, which is a potential privacy issue.
- The other is to select a language from the list, which makes it appear in the compact list. But just because you wanted to read one article in a language doesn't mean you might want to read all other articles in that language. The inability to remove languages from the compact list renders it useless.
[T]his is extremely opaque (what we call a “hidden affordance” in design) and therefore extremely user-unfriendly. Tab browsing has existed for more than two decades. When we select a different language we right-click and open in new tab so that we can read both versions and compare them, so our true selections are never registered. When we left-click it’s a mistake. So oftentimes the compact menu registers the exact wrong selections.
Previous wishlist surveys: 2023
Assigned focus area
Unassigned.
Type of wish
Feature request
Related projects
Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikivoyage, Wikiquote, Wikiversity, Wikinews
Affected users
Multilingual readers, readers who use machine translation because a different language edition has more content