Wikipedia talk:Language order poll

All or just interlanguage link lists?

Is this about Wikipedia:Interlanguage links or other lists? -- User:Docu

I assumed it was about interlanguage links. Angela. 22:02, Feb 14, 2004 (UTC)

At first I assumed the same, but re-reading the "different ones are used in different cases" made me hesitate. If it's for Interlanguage links it's probably to update the order set in "interwiki_putfirst" of the pywikipediabot wikipedia.py-file -- User:Docu

Language order and the question of the number of speakers

Hi, I am a newcomer, and I wrote the following in the village pump:

• The language list at the bottom of all main pages lists the languages by alphabetical order, which gives a distorted image of what Wikipedia really is. I suggest the language be ranked by number of articles, or by volume (with some indication of it between brackets, say: Tatarça (31 articles)). This could encourage contributors to promote their Wikipedia. Also newcomers will have a sharper image of what they can expect in the different language Wikipedias.

I would like to add here that the option of ordering languages by number of speakers (native or not) seems to me both unrealistic and unfair.

• Unrealistic, because the figures are and will be much disputed, especially when two languages are close to each other in terms of number of speakers, or when the figures are not well established, or biaised for reasons external to Wikipedia (doesn't every governement or community tend to pretend that its language is more widely spoken than the next?).
• Unfair, because Wikipedist who are working a lot to improve their Wikipedias, though the number of speakers of their language is not overwhelming, are doing a great job that will not be rewarded. After all, the value of Wikipedia is not a function of the number of its potential readers but of the number and the quality of articles. So, shouldn't the ranking be done according to them? Well, quality is difficult to judge, but number of articles or volume seem objective figures to consider.

These are just suggestions, let me know what you think folks. --Milaiklainim 09:33, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Issues relating to the order of the links on the Main Page are also being discussed at Template talk:Wikipedialang. Angela. 02:13, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

Poll result should be respected by bots

'Sorting language links by ISO 639 codes on edit pages' (possibly in combination with a MediaWiki upgrade to sort by local language name for page views) obviously got most votes. However, sorting by local language name still seems to be the de-facto standard on en: (although I guess that nearly nobody, except for bots, exactly knows the desired order). Thus, I think that the interwiki bots should be changed so that they no longer sort based on the local names of the languages (as they do now on en:), but on the ISO 639 code (as they do on most other Wikipedias). What do you think of it? --Head 00:04, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

You need to try and persuade the author of pywikipediabot, in that case, because, in the past, I understood that most sort-ordering bots were based on pywikipediabot, which used the native language order in pywikipediabot wikipedia.py-file. Unless that has changed, and the vote hardly establishes a concensus, the default should be by native language.

Poll or policy?

While the poll is a poll, do we have any policy on sorting of interlanguage links, or can anyone sort the links as they wish? --Eddi (Talk) 16:39, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

The problem is that we have no policy and at leats I have no idea what is the established practice either. Jeltz talk 16:45, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Change order?

Is there a way to locally reorder the languages? I find it pretty irritating when I'm searching for a particular language and don't have the words I'm actually looking at in any particular order. So a setting to get "alphabet, based on local language" just for the people who use the language list quite often but not often enough to not be thrown off by all the wrong letters appearing in the middle of the alphabet would be really great. Is there a way to do this? --Mudd1 (talk) 08:20, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

@Mudd1: This page doesn't have many watchers, mainly because the matters that it considers were resolved several years ago. The order of presentation for the languages in the left margin is now set centrally (it changed from being set on a per-page basis round about October 2012), so that it's consistent for all pages in this wiki, and as far as I know is the same on other wikis as well. I'm pretty sure that it's not user-configurable, but if you ask at WP:VPT somebody may come up with a user script which will alter the order for you alone, but this will slow down page load times. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:39, 15 December 2014 (UTC)