Put the language icons back on the homepage

With the homepage's overhaul, it's become impossible to access the other language versions of the wiki. The icons linking to them are gone. The "Related To" to are also gone.

Heck, even the Home Pages Index bar is gone.

It's become ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to access the other language versions of the wiki if you don't know they exist. It also means that contribution to these namespace will be even more sparce that it already was.

Heck, the Darth Wiki is more prominently featured than our other language versions. What's up with that?

edited 6th Apr '11 10:05:43 PM by Ghilz

All good points. What do we think of having a button on the Home Page that links to the index of specific language Home pages?

Doing a database look-up every time we paint a page to see which languages the page might be in is more than we can handle on our budget. Please remember, we are poor volunteers with only our love of tropes between us and the Darkness. Have mercy on your mercilessly laboring servers.

A button to something like a Languages.Home Page seems like it would be much quicker since it's a fixed variable.

Button to Main.Home Pages could work, labelled as "Other Languages"?

Ideally, I'd suggest making it more prominent than the standard blue buttons however. So it better stands out to non-english speakers who otherwise may not notice it's there at all. It would give a big visibility boost to the other language versions of the wiki.

I agree. If it is mixed with the other blue buttons, people will likely not even noticed a new one appeared. They will just assume they are still the same and pay no attention. If the same button appear in every page, however, then it will be even better.

Bumping this, as it came up in Ask The Tropers not long ago.

Sill support a simple "languages" button that shows up on all pages, regardless of if there's any translated page.

Or maybe just a Misc. Subpages button. Click on it and it gives you all the subpages that the current page has. That way they're only looked up if someone wants that specific information.

I prefer Language. Foreign tropers are more likely to look for THAT than something called misc subpage...

And I insist the button should be different from the rest, make it noticeable for the newbies.

It is a recognized good idiom to make internationalizated pages visually distinct from other forms of content differentiation. Most CMS systems use for example the idiom of an indicator list with country flags (with which I actually disagree, but I digress as I usually do).

Any option to access the language subpages should be visually distinct from all the other assortments of subpages that we can create for any page; I guess a single "world" icon with relevant text might be a good choice.

The old solution with language buttons for every translated article was quite useful for us translators because they indicated easily which page was already translated and which wasn't.

If it's too much a workload for the server to search for translated pages every time a page is loaded in a browser, maybe what we need is a way to take this workload off the server. My idea is to not only make a tagged link from the translated page to the English page but also from the English page to each translated one, maybe even between translations, like it's common practice at The Other Wiki. This, however, would require some discipline when translating a page.

It doesn't need to be "every time a page is loaded". The chance that a non-translated page appears in the next visit is, frankly, minimal, and translating pages takes enough effort that it's not something that happens expectably as you refresh a page. Perhaps reducing the load to only "the first visit in the day".

Other than that, having a dedicated Language Links (name?)space for every page would reduce the load to only those times the existence of translations is actually queried upon. Wouldn't know how preferably would that be from a user interface perspective though.

If I understand correctly, the wiki currently has to search for the foreign language pages, which takes up a lot of resources. This needs to be done because the English and foreign titles do not match. Would it be possible to use redirects to get around doing a database look-up?

For example, the Spanish article for The Chick is titled La Chica. Make Es/TheChick a redirect to Es/LaChica. The wiki sees there's a Spanish version of the page and generates the icon, while the article still keeps its Spanish name.

(That's basically how the Darth Wiki homepage is setup currently: a DarthWiki/HomePage is a redirect to DarthWiki/ThisExists.)

The same effect with much less server load can be achieved with a dedicated language links page per-trope anyway, as it only has to be rechecked when that list itself has been edited (which, depending on how things work in the server, may only require a dtime() call contrasted to a full file load and parsing). At least that's how Doku Wiki seems to be doing it. Such a dedicated list would also reduce the probability of reduncandy and outdating errors happening.

We could request a special page to register a page (internationalized or not) as fitting a specific language links list (eg.: Es.La Chica fits the The Chick one), which could be based on the current custom titles form user-interface wise.

Bumping this thread because a similar solution has been implemented for subpages and relatedpages. No technical reason why this couldn't be used to list translation pages as well.

Another solution could be the manual links I suggested three weeks ago. Nothing to do for the admins at all, the entire workload would go to the Tropers, and if it's unwanted or rendered unnecessary, it can be removed again just as easily.

Is this still wanted?

Guess not. So closing.