Open questions:
What should we do with the gear for the interface language settings when there are no interlanguage links?

I believe that @Pginer-WMF and the language team have decided that it is not necessary for us to provide access to these settings from any/all pages. I believe in this case, since Special pages don't seem to have language switching, we would remove that section from the sidebar and leave it at that.

Are the language team, Wikidata team or web team responsible for the work here?

My understanding is the languages menu only appears on special pages due to the way UniversalLanguageSelector adds the settings cog so the change would need to happen in UniversalLanguageSelector here:
https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-UniversalLanguageSelector/blob/master/includes/Hooks.php#L525

Currently the Language team is working on T289840 to extend the language selector with additional actions which will provide access to language settings and Wikidata link editing. This will make the options added around the language menu in the sidebar no longer needed. However, that won't cover two cases:

• Content pages not available in other languages. Those would require to show the language selector in an empty state (T290436).
• Special pages where the language selector is not shown. The relevant case for this ticket.

The settings icon is used to switch the UI language, and we need to determine whether to support it and how to do so. A relevant scenario to consider could be: receiving a link to Recent Changes (with a specific filtering and result set) for a Wiki in a language you don't speak, and trying to change the UI to your language. For example, this link for recent translations with ORES scores in Korean Wikipedia. If there is no easy access to language settings, users may need to make a workaround if it is not available which involves going through the settings or switch to a different page which has it to do the change. Both requiring context switching.

Some possible directions to explore:

• Show the language selector on Special pages. It may make sense for users to switch from Recent changes in English Wikipedia to Recent Changes in French.
• Use the language selector placement to provide access to language settings. Either showing a special empty state ("this is a special page...") or showing directly language options.
• On special pages, include an option on the sidebar menu to access language options. This may be less discoverable but provide at least a shortcut to support the scenario.
• Don't support this usecase. Not providing an easy way to change the UI language or connect a special page on Wikidata, considering advanced cases that advanced users could navigate by accessing settings or Wikidata.

The user mental model for users is often a bit blurry about the set-up of multiple sites with different language versions, and the differences between content and UI language. So we may want to check what could be less confusing.