Page MenuHomePhabricator

Adjust the connection between the Explore languages option and the Language selector
Closed, ResolvedPublic4 Estimated Story Points

Description

As part of the work on the MinT for Wiki Readers MVP (T359072), an option to "Explore languages" (T359863) is provided so that users can identify the languages where there is more content available, and which sections are covered. In this way, they can decide which language version to pick to machine translate and learn the most relevant aspects on the topic.

The initial implementation is listing all languages in which the page is available. This can generate a really long list for some articles, which often includes a long tail of articles with 1-2 sections likely to be covered by other options. In addition, the "All languages for this topic" option is currently acting as a filter, while it was expected to navigate to the standard language selector.

This ticket proposes to:

  • Limit the size of the list of languages to explore.
  • Provide an indicator at the end to access all languages.
  • Make the "All languages for this topic" and the new indicator to navigate to the language selector.

This is based on the idea shared in T359863#9994272:

When articles are available in many languages, show in the list those with most coverage (i.e., those with more sections + the most detailed one). Having a long tail of articles with just 1-2 sections is not very easy to handle in a flat list in any case.

We'll show only the 10-15 languages* with most coverage plus the currently selected one (if it was not in the list already). For the rest, we can just provide one option at the end to access all of them. This will lead to the language selector (same as the "View all languages" option on top) where users can see the list of all languages with better tools to select them.

Access to all languages.png (1×1 px, 79 KB)

*When showing 10-15 languages, we may want to have a flexible threshold:

  • 10 languages if there are 15 or more in total.
  • All languages if there are less than 15 in total.

In this way, we avoid a situation with 11 languages where we show 10 providing the "more" option just for an additional one.

Event Timeline

Pginer-WMF triaged this task as Medium priority.
Wangombe changed the task status from Open to In Progress.Mar 18 2025, 8:18 AM
Wangombe claimed this task.

Change #1128794 had a related patch set uploaded (by Wangombe; author: Wangombe):

[mediawiki/extensions/ContentTranslation@master] AX: Limit items shown in Explore languages

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1128794

abi_ set the point value for this task to 4.

Change #1128794 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/ContentTranslation@master] AX: Limit items shown in Explore languages

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1128794

hueitan subscribed.
Source target less than 15, show ALLSource target more than 15Navigate to the language selector
Myrmarachne Linguiensis Translation.png (2×962 px, 243 KB)
Myrmarachne Linguiensis Translation (1).png (2×962 px, 325 KB)
Myrmarachne Linguiensis Translation Confirmation.png (2×962 px, 198 KB)