If we do a naive string sort, that will be "sort of but not entirely mostly right" within many scripts, and will order scripts by their Unicode order. Not convinced how useful that result would be...

I like the way they're sorted at the top of https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias:

Languages: Alemannisch (als) · Ænglisc (ang) · العربية (ar) · سنڌي (sd) · Azərbaycanca (az) · Български (bg) · Bahasa Banjar (bjn) · বাংলা (bn) · Català (ca) · Česky (cs) · Словѣ́ньскъ / ⰔⰎⰑⰂⰡⰐⰠⰔⰍⰟ (cu) · Deutsch (de) · Ελληνικά (el) · English (en) · Esperanto (eo) · Español (es) · فارسی (fa) · Suomi (fi) · Français (fr) · ગુજરાતી (gu) · עברית (he) · हिन्दी (hi) · Հայերեն (hy) · Bahasa Indonesia (id) · मराठी (mr) · Italiano (it) · 日本語 (ja) · Basa Jawa (jv) · ქართული (ka) · 한국어 (ko) · Latviešu (lv) · Lietuvių (lt) · Magyar (hu) · Bahasa Melayu (ms) · Македонски (mk) · مازِرونی (mzn) · नेपाल भाषा (new) · नेपाली (ne) · ਪੰਜਾਬੀ (pa) · Polski (pl) · پښتو (ps) · Português (pt) · Română (ro) · Русский (ru) · Svenska (sv) · தமிழ் (ta) · ไทย (th) · Türkçe (tr) · Українська (uk) · Tiếng Việt (vi) · Yorùbá (yo) · 中文 (zh) · Zazaki (diq) ·

philinje wrote:

Let's go with the meta list.

I like 'order by number of articles' that the tables below show. Is that list manually maintained or autogenerated from somewhere?

Showing it by the same order as they appear in the article would be the most sensible solution now. Editors communities in some languages requested a particular order that would be useful for the readers in the respective languages.

See also:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_sorting_order

On the other hand, this can be discussed again.

@Amir: This is how we currently show it in the 'Read in' view, I'm guessing it can be adapted for language settings too.

(In reply to comment #6)

@Amir: This is how we currently show it in the 'Read in' view, I'm guessing it
can be adapted for language settings too.

Oh! I'm confused then; i thought that this bug is about the articles.

For the preferences it's indeed harder and it's not the first time it comes up either. It's relevant for MediaWiki user preferences, too, and for many other things.

I'll try to think of more options, but there will always be somebody who won't like it...

Not for v1.1.

There is design study at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector_Mobile so this bug is making progress!

I think that before 1.2 beta it used to be sorted according to language code, or at least according to something. Now it appears to be completely random:

Cebuano (ceb)
Yoruba (yo)
German (de)
Danish (da)
French (fr)
Dzongkha (dz)

It should be sorted by something, otherwise it's way too hard to choose a language.

This has been fixed, is sorted in Unicode order now.