Meta:Babel/Archives/2015-10

Wikimedia project index pages

There was a discussion at Jimbo's talk page about the choice of languages in the main page for several of the Wikimedia projects.

One interesting point made was that the process for selecting the languages is based on page views even though the image shows the number of entries. That sounds like a sensible decision which helps avoid the game playing potential.

The suggestion was made in the course of that discussion that if anyone is interested in revisiting the choice of languages, that discussion should occur here. Not having seen anyone else start the discussion, I'm starting it.

I note the impossibility of including all languages (although we do come close, with all languages no more than one link away I believe). However it is clear that some languages get more prominence than others.

I'll throw out a suggestion that we can eat our cake and have it to.

What if we reserved five of the 10 prominent spots for the top five languages in terms of hits, and reserved the other five for a rotating list of all remaining languages. I realize this would create a modest technical challenge for whomever creates that image, but I'm sure some of our clever template editors could whip up something relatively easily.

The ultimate might be a template which picks five static languages and then randomly chooses five other languages, so that each time you reload you get a new image. That might be technically too difficult, so an alternative is to make a list of all the languages that belong in the second tier spot, and cycle through them perhaps once a week swapping out one set of five for another.

In essence, I'm suggesting that we do something similar to how we handle the main page with featured articles and DYK. We don't pick a single entry and keep it there forever we rotate them out on a regular basis, daily for the featured article and every few hours for the DYK. If we can do that I can't imagine that this could be any harder. It should be much easier as we have a small well-defined set of languages.--Sphilbrick (talk) 19:47, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

What is this supposed to achieve? Naturally the languages with the most viewers will also be the languages most people will look for on the portal pages, so they should be prominently displayed. --MF-W 22:49, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata access is here

I recently announced that you'll get access to Wikidata. We start with access to interwiki links. This means you can for example add your help portal to the Wikidata item for all the other projects' help portals (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q914807). This has happened now. If everything goes well the next step is giving you access to the actual data like the date of birth of a famous person, the current version of some software and so on. I'll let you know in advance again when that'll happen. In case you have questions or need some help please come to d:Wikidata:Meta-Wiki.

Cheers --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 07:35, 21 October 2015 (UTC)