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Don’t display language fallback indicators for variant fallbacks
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Description

When applying fallbacks while rendering a label on an entity reference, we currently add a language indicator to tell the user that they are seeing content that is not in their preferred language. E. g. a reference to Wien may render as “Wien (German)” for an English user if no English label “Vienna” exists.

However, this is annoying for users who wish to set their UI to a variant, like British or Canadian English, Swiss or Austrian German, Brazilian Portuguese, etc.: they will see such indicators nearly everywhere. And this has prompted people to write bots that copy the label from the base language to all variants, bloating Wikidata with redundant information.

Solution:
Don't show a fallback indicator if the fallback is between variants. We already mark fallback indicators for fallbacks between variants with the CSS class wb-language-fallback-variant. We could make that hidden per default, or locally on Wikidata, and allow people to enable it via a gadget. Or there could be a gadget to turn these indicators off. Or use an on-per-default gadget that turns it off? Whatever. It's just a line of CSS!

(Description by @daniel, originally sent via email.)

Event Timeline

Change 374227 had a related patch set uploaded (by Lucas Werkmeister (WMDE); owner: Lucas Werkmeister (WMDE)):
[mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase@master] Hide fallback indicators for language variants

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/374227

Change 374227 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase@master] Hide fallback indicators for language variants

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/374227

The indicators can be restored with the following CSS snippet:

1.wikibase-entityview .wb-language-fallback-indicator.wb-language-fallback-variant {
2 display: unset;
3}