Commons:Requests for comment/UniversalLanguageSelector

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Update: ULS can be tested on the Commons beta (the test has not been setup completely yet, not all features are available for testing)

Background

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This window opens when clicking a language link in the personal link area.

UniversalLanguageSelector is a Mediawiki extension for language selection. It is currently enabled on Meta, translatewiki.net and Wikidata (as well as any other Wikimedia project using the Translate extension).

As for ULS, it does multiple things:

  • Webfonts and input methods
  • Language selection
  • Language detection for anon users

Due to technical challenges we've not been able to enable all features of ULS for anonymous users yet, except in translatewiki.net.

Nikerabbit, 14:44, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Use on Wikimedia Commons

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Enabling UniversalLanguageSelector on Wikimedia Commons has previously been discussed on Commons-l mailing-list and on COM:VPP.

As you have probably noticed, translatewiki and now also metawiki have Extension UniversalLanguageSelector enabled. I think since we are a multilingual project, there could be benefit in enabling this at Commons as well. Comments are welcome.

Rillke(q?) 15:25, 19 January 2013 (UTC) source

The UniversalLanguageSelector extension allows users to easily switch the interface language; it also embeds an interface to enter text in non-Latin languages even if your keyboard doesn't allow it.

guillom, 13:36, 21 January 2013 (UTC) source

Questions

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Don’t we already have fancy language selection?

Yes, Wikimedia Commons currently relies on MediaWiki:AnonymousI18N.js which has the following features:

  • Language selection (with a dropdown in the sidebar)
  • Language suggestion when possible (above the page title), based on « data from cookie, referal url & browser settings »
  • Language “uselang” persistency, regardless of the previous. Meaning, if landing on Commons from a URL with ?uselang=fr (obviously from templates on projects, but also from links), the ?uselang=fr is set for all outbound links, meaning language persistence.

ULS, in contrast, has a carefully designed selector (for discoverability and usability) and a proper persistence of language selection without the uselang hack.

We also rely on a number of language templates to show the appropriate content based on the language selection:

ULS doesn't directly solve the problem of the double language selection, but will hopefully allow future development of our scripts and templates to make use of ULS rather than local, custom selectors.

What are the existing feature requests in this area?
  • bugzilla:1135 − Language on Commons should default to browser language preferences
  • bugzilla:8287 − Enable multilingual extension in Commons

Deployment plan

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Comments

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