See also brion's comments: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32906#c10

Duping to bug 21806.

• This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 21806 ***

@brion, this ticket was about content language variants, bug 21806 is about interface language variants.

You can switch the language of the content... am I misunderstanding?

In non-beta you click the W
In beta go to the blue ribbon poking from the right and expand it to choose a language

(In reply to comment #4)

You can switch the language of the content... am I misunderstanding?

That's language_urls a list of interlanguage links to other wikis.

Some languages such as zh have variants. These are kind of like sub-languages on the same wiki. Usually the same text in another script or something. This works by running a language converter over the page content.

You can see the variant menu by going to https://zh.wikipedia.org/ and looking at the menu beside the two namespace tabs.

This is missing from the mobile site. So it's not fixed.

Created attachment 11193
screenshot

Since it seems rather common that people forget what variants are, I'll add a screenshot, will save some discussion hopefully.

Attached:

jgonera wrote:

*** Bug 41875 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Confirmed fixed, though I note that it doesn't skip over some of the aliases/disabled versions of variants:

See also SkinTemplate.php which is responsible for this in skins.

// Loops over each variant
foreach( $variants as $code ) {
        // Gets variant name from language code
        $varname = $pageLang->getVariantname( $code );
        // Checks if the variant is marked as disabled
        if( $varname == 'disable' ) {
                // Skips this variant
                continue;
        }
        // Appends variant link
        $content_navigation['variants'][] = array(
                'class' => ( $code == $preferred ) ? 'selected' : false,
                'text' => $varname,
                'href' => $title->getLocalURL( array( 'variant' => $code ) + $params ),
                'lang' => $code,
                'hreflang' => $code
        );
}