I'd like to have a better language selector first if the problem really is that people are unable to go the preferences and switch it there.

Niklas, what do you think a better language selector would look like?

I don't know how good language selector would look like, but the current one could perhaps be made better by allowing typed input with autocompletion (while also retaining the select input). Someone in the WMF office was working on something like that.

bugs wrote:

(In reply to comment #3)

I don't know how good language selector would look like, but the current one
could perhaps be made better by allowing typed input with autocompletion (while
also retaining the select input). Someone in the WMF office was working on
something like that.

Maybe http://www.gpaumier.org/blog/628_universal-language-picker/ ?

(In reply to comment #1)

I'd like to have a better language selector first if the problem really is that
people are unable to go the preferences and switch it there.

I agree and I think the account creation page should stay as simple as it is, although if we decide to make it more complex this would be the first (and only?) preference to add. See also bug 30442 comment 23 and bug 30442 comment 34.

I think limiting this to the account creation page is wrong in the first place.

When a user visits a wiki in another language for the first time, the entire ui is in another language... how does the user even reach the create account page when he can't read any of the links?

Sure, the links are in consistent locations, and you can modify the url. But what if the user is new, not a power user. What if they haven't been around and we've changed things around a little. Relying on the user to stumble around just to get to that point is a bad experience to put users through, and not a good level of usability.

Rather than talking about adding this to the userpage. I think there should be a way to change the current language from ANY page in the wiki. So you can change your lang, see where the login / create account link is, follow it, and by the time you're on the create account page it ALREADY knows what language it's going to set your default to.

Oh, and user preferences? I just logged into a foreign lang Wikipedia, I have NO clue which one of those 6 mystery links leads to the preferences page. My first guess was wrong. That would be a bad UI.

I'm thinking of something somewhere in the ui. That universal language picker input would be available from it, whether it's right in the page or clicking on it opens it up.

This kind of code could be used to let it grab what languages it should bring to the top when typing. Perhaps the input could have a list of these languages right after it to give the user a quick way to access the languages their browser says are what they want.
https://gist.github.com/1306599
http://trunk.new.wiki-tools.com/lang.php

The (new) api module action=createaccount allows setting the language while creating the account, so the ui should allow it also.