Talk:Www.wikipedia.org template/2008

code view

I think it would do no harm if the code was indented (like Www.wikimedia.org template is) to make it readable here on meta, by using the built-in <pre> formatting that turns on if the first character of a line is a space. The other template could also use the same in the start and end tags (only one space would do!) And happy new year to all! Waldir 04:08, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Here's what it looks like. Isn't pretty... Since the unindented version is slightly more readable (doesn't require horizontal scrolling), I think we should stick with that until we have some way of putting <nowiki> tags in there without those tags showing up in the final HTML code. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 02:16, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

I think it's evident that the main reason the wikipedia.org template doesn't render here as nicely as the wikimedia.org template is because wikipedia.org uses divs, while wikimedia.org uses tables. I made an experiment on User:Waldir/TableWikipedia.org to see how it would look (I only worked on the round logo part, since getting the rest of the page into a table should be trivial). It seems to be both the html view and the indented (pseudo-<pre>) view are better than how it is currently. Any thoughts? Waldir 03:57, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Just a note: the indented HTML view looks horrible in IE6 (it's cool in FF2), but anyway I was quite satisfied with the unindented HTML :) Waldir 04:11, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

rethinking the top ten

I'd like to relaunch the top ten discussion. I have read this talk page from top to bottom, and I think I can summmarise the ideas presented here (under my personal opinion, evidently -- I hope you don't mind :P )

Starting off, I think that the criteria for showing around the globe as a 100K+ article count should be definitely put out of question. The list will just keep growing bigger and bigger. It has been noted many times that this solution is far from ideal, and besides there's no written rule regarding that, so people will keep asking why are some wikipedias not there, until we define a clear set of rules of inclusion. A top-ten approach is robust and scalable (If we choose a relative rather than absolute measure, we avoid stuff like "a wiki that creates several thousand stubs to get to 100,000 will remain at the top even if it never grows beyond that"). We just need to figure out which criteria we'll use to generate the "top ten" list. However, it would perhaps be useful to keep 100K+ as a threshold to avoind strange results from some of the criteria below. Here's a quick summary of the proposals made, spread across several sections of this talk page:

• top ten by article count (current) -- rewards effort, but might create competition, encourage stubs
• top ten languages (Minh Nguyễn, Perceval) -- usability (many users from those languages would quickly find their wikipedia), internationalization, most of them have over 100K, but unfair to hardworking top ten by article count that are left out.
• top ten by average article lenght (FreshFruitsRule, 216.106.103.3, )-- not a good measure of quality, and people could still try to trick this. Alternatively, 1 − Stub-ratio could be used.
• top ten by highest ratio of speakers per article (me) -- probably fair, since wikipedias in languages with few speakers that manage to reach a reasonable size are worth being promoted, but strange results would appear, especially if we don't include the 100K threshold. Alternatively, users per article ratio could also be used, perhaps with better results.
• tag cloud? (Dr Bug) -- I personally dont find them readable, but they became famous for a reason. plus, all wikis could be listed by alphabetical order making it easier to find a specific language. Not sure how to order non-latin characters though. We should probably use the Interwiki sorting order

I'll make a table to allow comparison among these different ideas. Till there, I'll be expecting your thoughts on the matter. Waldir 05:44, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

So happy to see that someone has relaunched the top ten discussion. I personally support top ten languages most, since it is the best criterion to determine which languages are "top". The option which I oppose most is top ten by highest ratio of speakers per article. As you can see, Volapük, which has only 30 speakers, will be the toppest, but Chinese, which have nearly a biilion speakers and over 10k articles, will be very low and never get into top 10 (or even top 50). -- Kevinhksouth 07:57, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm compiling some data here, please edit the page and/or provide some feedback so the page gets ready for moving to a proper discussion place. Waldir 23:05, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

I personally like the idea of a tag cloud. As weighting criterion for the font size I would use an averaged index of the four criteria article count, number of native speakers, average article lenght and number of users. Stubs would no longer be encouraged, and it would generally be difficult to trick this index because of its diversity of criteria. (Additionally I would limit the tag cloud to the top 150 Wikipedias (by the averaged index), so that the others could then only be found in the "Other languages" link (already now the 39 Wikipedias with less than 100 articles can only be found there)).

If however we stay with the current list and the top ten, we should at least use the averaged index for the top ten. Marcos 03:10, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

(Additionally I would use "number of active speakers" instead of "number of native speakers" for planned languages, as the number of native speakers is quite an irrelevant figure in their case.) Marcos 03:22, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Ok, I moved the table to the main namespace: Top Ten Wikipedias. I'll spam the village pumps of all the 100+ wikipedias to gather a wide set of opinions. Please make further comments there. Waldir 18:53, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Update: I left a message in all 100K+ village pumps, except zh, tr and fi (couldn't figure out where/how to write -- and indication of a need to make those pages more international-friendly?) Waldir 19:40, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Impressive work :) I myself would incline towards usability criteria. The mainpage is not used to pump egos, but to efficiently serve the users. Thus, combining the criteria of (a) number of articles (perhaps as a threshold) and (b) number of active users speaking the given language could be considerable. Also, with IP maps being pretty well developed, one could think of delivering different versions of the mainpage to different IP ranges (we could also take into account the language used in the operating system)... Pundit 01:55, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

You might want to approach the developers with that idea, but it definitely won't work the way we have things set up right now (just one version of the portal). Actually, the various national portals could alleviate this issue by limiting the number of choices. (For instance, Switzerland, Austria, France, the Netherlands, and Germany.) If we got enough of these set up, the main portal could simply link to these portals. Unfortunately, the concept of national portals is currently tied to national Wikimedia chapters, and there are only so many of those. Also, many of the country-specific domains simply direct users to one Wikipedia edition (Hungary, Poland, Argentina, Israel, and Australia). – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 19:37, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Of course, you're right. Even if the local domain opens .wikipedia.org content (like here), we need a universal approach. I'd personally go for usability understood as displaying encyclopedias basing on the minimal number of articles (100,000? 200,000? 300,000?), and as a second criterion, on the number of native speakers of a given language, probably nothing else... Pundit 20:30, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

I moved a message posted here by User:DonaldDuck to Top Ten Wikipedias --Waldir 17:39, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Suggestion: Removing the duplicate wikipedias from the mainpage

I think the top ten languages wikipedias (English-Svenska) should be removed from the "100 000+" list since they are also listed around the wikipedia-logo above. As far as I know, they've only been listed so that the #11 place (the Russian wikipedia) wouldn't be "lonely" in this category. Now there are sixteen editions with 100 000+ articles, #11-#16 should be enough so that the top ten isn't needed anymore to be redundantly listed twice. --85.176.237.171 08:07, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

I agree. Waldir 05:45, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Quotes from above:

• "I'd suggest including the top 10 editions and Russian in a new 100,000-article section, so that the list won't be so small." (User:Mxn)
• "The Russian Wikipedia has already reached about 101000 articles and it's still in the 10000+ list. Now we have two options, to put it near the logo OR to create a 100000+ section for the non-Top 10 wikipedias. Soon we may be adding the Chinese & Finnish wikipedias to that list. For now I will try the second option and we'll see how it looks, but I have a feeling that Russian's going to look pretty lonely at least until the other languages catch up." (User:Lenev)
• "Russian does look pretty lonely right now. Would anyone be willing to try my suggestion and include the Top 10 languages in that 100,000+ list as well? It's just ten extra links. :^)" (User:Mxn)

and from from #New 100,000+ section:

• "This approach is a bit redundant, since it provides two links for each of the ten largest editions" (user:Mxn)

With all this, I think it is safe to update the list by removing the redundant links. If noone pronounces on this for some time (as usual, sigh), I'll remove them myself from the /temp page. 87.196.212.165 18:05, 23 March 2008 (UTC) (I didnt notice I was logged off. signing now.) Waldir 18:07, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Korean mainpage moved

Korean mainpage was moved from 대문 to 위키백과:대문. --Ficell 09:43, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Bug in Firefox 3

Firefox 3 Beta 5 (at least on the Mac) seems to have an issue where the Latn Azeri and Hebrew links are moved to the far right of the page. The two lines that contain those links jump repeatedly on mouseover, making it impossible to click on either link. I don't recall this happening in Beta 4. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 23:43, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Looks like it's still possible to follow the links that jump around in Beta 5. You can drag the link to the Location Bar or an empty space in the tab bar, but that's a bit of a kludge. I also noticed the issue on the Wiktionary portal.

It seems there's a way around this issue: if the right-to-left (RTL) text is not alone in an element, it doesn't go haywire. So, for example, if you place a "d" inside every span or a tag that directly contains RTL text, nothing jumps around. Of course, that's less than ideal. Punctuation won't fix things in Beta 5, because they've changed the layout handling to recognize punctuation as RTL text when it's next to RTL text. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 19:26, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

As long as it is a beta edition, I don't think we should be concerned, anyway... Pundit 17:08, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Looks like Beta 5 is the last before the final release, though, and nothing about jumping links appears to be on the blocker list at Bugzilla, so I think it's time to start looking into this issue again... – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 08:02, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't see the issue anymore in Firefox 3 RC1 on the Mac. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 06:08, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

The issue in question was Bug 425338. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 20:32, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Recent addition

The recent addition of Glagolitic text means that there's, to my knowledge, no browser/OS configuration able to display all languages on www.wikipedia.org. While Opera fails at displaying Glagolitic, Firefox is unable to select the correct fonts for Kannada, Tibetan and other languages (they appear extremely odd). I don't know whether this is a problem, but it prevents people from updating Image:Www.wikipedia.org screenshot.png. -- Prince Kassad 17:41, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

AFAIK, it all depends on which fonts you have installed on your computer. So if you have no font with Glagolitic text, you need to download one. Jon Harald Søby 18:01, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

It's not as easy as that. Browsers have very odd font preferences. For example, Opera chokes at everything >Unicode 3.2, while Firefox selects fonts at will and ignores the settings. However, now that you mentioned it, a <span> with font definitions might fix the glagolitic problems. -- Prince Kassad 18:13, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

It looks fine for me in Safari 3.1.1 (Mac OS X 10.4.11), though it may be because I've already installed lots of fonts for the scripts on this page. Safari's also available for Windows, by the way. If the Glagolithic makes it too inconvenient to update the screenshot regularly, I'll remove it, because the Old Slavonic Wikipedia only uses it on their front page and logo, as far as I can tell. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 23:56, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Safari for Windows does not show all the scripts and even cuts off some names. -- Prince Kassad 15:14, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I forgot to mention: at least in Safari for Mac, there's a bug where a lot of the names appear cut off. But if you hover over each of them, they're rendered in full. Displaying all of the scripts is dependent on having the proper fonts. The easiest way to get there is the huge Code2000 and Code2001 fonts. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 20:45, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

It works in Firefox 3 (even though font selection is still very buggy and depends on very exotic font combinations), so fonts are not the problem - something in Safari/Win is causing the problem. -- Prince Kassad 13:56, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Esperanto has more than 100,000 articles now

Esperanto should get moved up, as it has more than 100,000 articles now. Marcos 12:46, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Done Jon Harald Søby 13:18, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Sorting by kind of alphabet

This was posted earlier today on the discussion page about the top ten articles.
If you visit the frontpage and you wish to know if your language is there, do you know how much articles have been written in that language? No! You have to search the page if you speak li for example. All those strange languages through each other don't help much. What do you know about a language? That are the characters of some kind, we have the Cyrillic alphabet, Latin alphabet, Japanese writing system, and others. A lot of languages originate from the same root, to make it easier to find the right language, I would suggest grouping bij alphabet/writing system would help user most which look for their language. Romaine 18:25, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

I second this idea. Especially if the current poll happens to change the criteria in which the top ten are ordered, there will be less sense in organizing the wikipedias by size (afterall, it doesn't make it any easier for readers to find their edition. --Waldir 18:45, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

(sigh) We used to use a hybrid approach: first by number of articles, then by writing system. See /Language sorting for the lengthy discussion. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 08:44, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Chinese should not be italic?

I wonder if you know that, we seldom use italic style in Chinese character, as many people found that italic Chinese character is not pleasant for readers. So I wonder if remove italic style on Chinese characters. -- ※   JéRRy   ┼   雨雨   ※  16:23, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

I updated it with this version of the "sandbox" page where the Chinese editors hav been fiddling with it to make it to their liking. :-) Is it okay now? Cbrown1023 talk 17:43, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Thx... It looks much better and cooler :p-- ※   JéRRy   ┼   雨雨   ※  16:26, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Do not use Alexa as main source!

Currently, Alexa figures are used for www.wikipedia.org_template, see diff ^{(see comments (%))}!
For those who did not know that: Alexa is not the most accurate source, not at all! See Alexa Internet#controversial figures ^(de).

If you do not use the Alexa toolbar or do not use the Internet Explorer (or just have the Alexa spyware removed from your Windows system), your visits to Wikipedia will not be counted!
Almost nobody uses the Alexa toolbar (maybe in the US), IE is really not the only browser and many people did remove the Alexa spyware bundled with IE!

For Non-English wikis, the Alexa figures are not very representative, see e.g.

Please base the ranking on our own stats; midom's wikistats offers the raw data for analyses like that traffic comparison and that search count comparison, e.g. That's the traffic our servers see, so why not use our own data as indication? See also Top Ten Wikipedias#most visited wikipedias.... --- Best regards, Melancholie 15:32, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

I totally agree, Alexa's datas are not very reliable for this purpose; using Domas' data is a lot better. Jon Harald Søby 19:01, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree too. It seems odd to be using Alexa's statistics, even though Alexa is pretty well-known, since we have our own data. Seems like things are just now settling down after the big vote; should we wait awhile before asking the community again about the portal (to avoid voter fatigue), or keep making changes before the current setup becomes permanent? – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 03:55, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Another vote? No; as people just voted for "Most visited wikipedias", not for "Alexa.com" explicitly, see Top_Ten_Wikipedias/poll#Option_B ;-) --- Greetings, Melancholie 10:00, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

For further discussion, see #most visited wikipedias! --Melancholie 22:57, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Aragonese wikipedia (an) is now over 10000 articles

Please update the main page www.wikipedia.org when possible. Thanks! --Juanpabl 17:40, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Done Cbrown1023 talk 19:28, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Automatic language selection

To make it easier for most of our users to go directly to the page they want, I've added a simple function to automatically select the user's language in the search box dropdown as soon as the page loads. It relies on the browser's language preferences, just as the existing Chinese character function does. If the user's language is not listed in the dropdown, English remains selected. The new function should work in every browser from at least 2000 (so IE 5.5+, Mozilla, Safari, etc.). If you encounter problems, please let me know.

Does it sound like a good idea to remember the user's language in a cookie for future visits? If so, I can hammer out such a function. I'd prefer not to get too fancy, though: every feature we add to the page will increase bandwidth consumption. The portal is already enormous, with its duplicate lang and xml:lang attributes (for valid XHTML), not to mention all the escaped character codes (like ·). So I wouldn't be in favor of detecting everyone's language unless we completely overhaul the page.

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 07:46, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

There has been a complaint about this here w:Talk:Main Page#Stop default local language selection at www.wikipedia.org although I'm of the opinion there's no need to change anything as explained there. The cookie thing sounds a good idea though provided it is optional (since some people hate cookies). Nil Einne 00:41, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up. I wonder if there's any more discussion about this change at the other language editions. I'm not sure how we could make the cookies optional without making the portal more confusing. I'll hold off on making any other changes of that sort until I hear more feedback. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 08:32, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Another comment on Wikimedia site feedback, [1]. Cbrown1023 talk 20:51, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

See also bugzilla:15518. Daniel (talk) 10:38, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Meta-wiki logo

The Meta-wiki logo requires updating. Microchip08 16:10, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

The new Meta-Wiki logo

Please update the Meta-Wiki logo at http://www.wikipedia.org. The old logo should be replaced by the new one. Thank you :) --M.L 19:50, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

{{editprotected}}

You forgot to add the template. ;-) Greeves ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:23, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Done EVula // talk // ☯ // 21:54, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Thank you :) --M.L 14:47, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

The German Main Page has been moved

The Main Page of dewiki has been moved from Hauptseite to Wikipedia:Hauptseite 6 10 weeks ago. Please replace http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptseite with http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hauptseite. There are two links at this Page. Thanks in advance! --M.L 14:47, 16 September 2008 (UTC) modified --15:12, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Updated. Somebody will synchronize it soon.
— Danny B. 14:54, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Thank you --M.L 15:38, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Page size reduction

I've just made a couple changes to the portal, slightly reducing the page size so that the page loads a bit faster:

Decoded URLs. Previously, they were in the form http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3%E3%83%9A%E3%83%BC%E3%82%B8, but now they look like http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/メインページ.

In older browsers that don't support Unicode, such as Netscape Navigator 3.x, the links remain functional, because MediaWiki knows to convert ISO-8859-1–encoded URLs to the Unicode equivalents. For newer browsers that do support Unicode, we're now relying on the browser to correctly render the page as Unicode. If the user manually selects another encoding, such as ISO-8859-1, everything breaks.

If this causes problems, we should shorten all the URLs to the form http://ja.wikipedia.org/, unless the wiki's MediaWiki:Mainpage doesn't reflect the front page's actual title. Depending on the user's configuration and Wikimedia's server load, the shortened URL takes slightly longer to load, due to an HTTP redirect.

Minified JavaScript. The two functions we embed directly in the page's <head> tag take up slightly more space than they need to, due to whitespace. So the human-readable version of the JavaScript source is now at Www.wikipedia.org template/js, and that source, minified using an online tool, is copy-pasted into Www.wikipedia.org template/temp. The JavaScript source doesn't need to be changed often, anyways.

With these changes, the portal size has gone down from 54 kB to 50 kB. Not much, but it's a first step. Although only the developers can address most of the remaining performance issues, there are a few more steps we can take at Meta:

• Abandon XHTML for the portal and go back to HTML 4.01, so that we can lose all the duplicate lang and xml:lang attributes while still validating.
• Implement the repeating book dividers as a background image, rather than repeating the <img> tags all over the place. This change would cost us compatibility with older browsers that don't support CSS or where stylesheets are disabled. Not that we really support them anyhow.
• Same deal with the project logos: use a single image that contains all the logos as sprites, and include the same background image multiple times. If you disable stylesheets, every project would get the same logo, unfortunately...
• Remove the 100+ level. This change is going to be catastrophically controversial, unfortunately. But the 100+ level uses a ton of code, and the 100-article milestone is becoming less and less important as Wikipedia matures. Don't get me wrong: I love the linguistic diversity at Wikipedia and the way we announce that diversity to the world on our front page. But it's helping to slow down the process of going to Wikipedia and finding what you're looking for. We can make up for the lack of the 100+ links by complementing the "Other languages" link with an icon, to make it easier to spot.

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 01:16, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

I disagree with removing the 100+ level. It weighs in at 9,901 characters, which seems to be a fair amount, but I don't think that's such a major issue (though, to be fair, I'm biased; the portal page loads quite snappy for me). I'd rather that people see and understand that they've got a Wikipedia in their language than force them to click on a "other languages" link that they may not be able to read. If we're so worried about shaving space, we could save 1,165 characters (in that section) by removing the direct paths to the Main Pages. We'd end up saving 3,874 characters if we remove the Main Page links for all the languages (total 44,945 characters).

On the logos, I totally understand what you're saying. However, if done properly, there would be no logo if the user disabled style sheets. It would require a single declaration in the style sheet, and then a single in-line background-position declaration for each link. That'd be a pretty handy way of lowering the number of files requested (and the resultant image would be significantly smaller than several different images). If we wanted to be smart about it, we could put all ten logos into a single image that is then used for every project's portal page (it would also standardize the size, if that makes any difference). It'd make updating a project's logo a bit of a bitch to do, but how often does that happen? (you know, other than the fact that Meta's logo just changed)

I agree about the book dividers, too; much more efficient to deliver them as CSS-based effects. EVula // talk // ☯ // 15:31, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Ah, good point about the sprited images. I forgot that when you disable stylesheets, they don't even show up at all. Converting the bookshelves to CSS has some browser compatibility issues. MZMcBride helped out with that, but I haven't gotten around to resolving the remaining issues. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 01:54, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Spanish wikipedia main page has been moved

The spanish main page has been moved from Portada to Wikipedia:Portada, can someone update this template? Thanks. Alvaro qc 14:58, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Done guillom 15:10, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

most visited wikipedias

As discussed above, data from Alexa is known to be not very accurate. Since we have our own server data, we should use this one instead. Here some exemplary data, taken at today (2008-09-28):

• total page hits per day [2]:

en (180M), ja (33M), de (27M), es (21), fr (13), it (9.8M), pl (9.5M), pt (7M), ru (5M), nl (4M)

• requests of main page [3] (this month):

en (194M), ja (32M), it (20M), de (19M), es (17M), fr (12M), pt (10M), pl (7M), ru (6M), nl (4M)

The first one considers the overall relevance of a language edition. On the other hand the second point is the target of the links on the main page. Probably, it is useful to take the data of a longer time intervall for more stable results (it is probably not the best idea to change the layout every month). Since the differences between both points are quite small (the only big variation is the rank of the Italian edition), it should not matter which of these two we actually use. The difference to the current ranking shows that Alexa's data is questionable. Thus we should change the layout to fulfill the result of the last poll. Best reagrds --Babucke 15:32, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Addition: there is also a third possibility (exemplary data also from 2008-09-28):

• number of users [4]:

en (122M), ja (22M), de (18M), es (14M), fr (9M), it (6.6M), pl (6.4M), pt(5M), ru (3.5M), nl (3M)

The sequence is basically the same as the first proposal. --Babucke 15:46, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Using the wikiStics data from the past few months, here are the 20 most visited Wikipedias in September, ordered by their two-month totals:

Language	August	September	2-month total
English	5,140,313,581	5,424,261,897	10,564,575,478
Japanese	1,002,257,816	998,037,895	2,000,295,711
German	804,316,854	817,613,518	1,621,930,372
Spanish	547,950,417	640,850,123	1,188,800,540
French	323,061,326	407,978,491	731,039,817
Italian	234,399,149	292,057,787	526,456,936
Polish	218,414,656	287,179,537	505,594,193
Portuguese	219,747,817	234,874,561	454,622,378
Russian	125,256,923	157,270,980	282,527,903
Dutch	116,654,265	137,655,890	254,310,155
Swedish	56,956,100	70,467,497	127,423,597
Chinese	56,483,116	56,344,638	112,827,754
Turkish	50,290,397	60,678,759	110,969,156
Finnish	53,144,517	56,300,126	109,444,643
Czech	29,495,366	36,898,727	66,394,093
Hebrew	29,720,836	30,635,800	60,356,636
Norwegian	26,873,609	32,272,487	59,146,096
Thai	25,294,418	23,693,897	48,988,315
Arabic	20,748,792	24,636,327	45,385,119
Hungarian	20,397,103	24,978,595	45,375,698

I think we should wait until enough of October has passed, so that we can take a more stable three-month total. Also, quite a few people will be sad to see Chinese go back below the fold.

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 04:22, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Only two? There are also comparisons for April, May, June and July ;-) Furthermore I will create a yearly (longterm) comparison the next days, too (like for pages). @visitors: Note that the guessed! number of visitors is directly based on the page hit stats (taking given external figures towards visitor behaviour into account), it's for a rough clue only! --- Best regards, Melancholie 08:46, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I will really be sad to see Chinese go back below the fold. The main reason why I (and many Chinese Wikipedians) supported "the 10 most visited" was to ensure Chinese to be listed in Top 10. -- Kevinhksouth 14:40, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

According to [5], April through June don't have complete data. In fact, May is based on one day alone. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 01:46, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

No, this only applies for detailed page hits analyses. The summaries are based on 30/31 days! Since today, see also that tables of Erik Zachte. --- Best regards, Melancholie 04:52, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Now there is http://wikistics.falsikon.de/2008/ (currently based on the 4 full months that contain *all* projects). --- Regards, Melancholie 22:55, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Alright, so the order looks like it'll be:

1. English
2. Japanese
3. German
4. Spanish
5. French
6. Italian
7. Polish
8. Portuguese
9. Russian
10. Dutch

Is everyone here alright with that order? (Thank goodness Russian will still be in the Top 10; they've been the most vocal about being included.)

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 05:22, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

OK, so an admin should change the template accordingly. --Babucke 14:35, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

I agree, this really needs to be fixed ASAP presuming there is nothing wrong with our figures (I know little about the tools used so I'm presuming that they are reliable, e.g. they're not significantly affected by the fact some wikis have more pages and are edited more and are therefore visited by bots more). I don't really visit www or meta much, or my watch page and so missed the poll and was shocked when I found out that Alexa was being used to rate wikipedias. While the idea of sorting by popularity was a sound one, the idea of using Alexa was always highly flawed given we are thinking about quite disparate groups of people and it was quite likely Alexa would be more popular among certain groups of countries then others. So I'm rather disappointed this was implemented without apparent consideration of the how flawed the plan was. It is even worse by the fact that we run the servers and so should always have been able to do the traffic figures ourselves somehow (whether with existing tools or new ones). And the fact that the new rankings are relatively different just shows how bad an idea using Alexa was. People asked for wikis to be sorted by most visited not by most visited by Alexa users. The fact that some wikipedias are of greater interest to Alexa users is no excuse whatsoever to give that wiki higher priority. Nil Einne 21:26, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Alright, I've rearranged the Top 10 languages according to the new statistics. Hopefully we won't have to make another jarring change anytime soon. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 22:09, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

We would be a lot less Eurocentric if we did the top 20 rather than the top 10. Why not just add another layer around the halo of the puzzle globe? There's plenty of whitespace on the left and right anyway.--Pharos 11:26, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

It's not that we don't have space – well, actually, we don't if you're talking about narrower screens like the iPhone – but adding 10 more links will make this part of the page considerably more complex and pretty much defeat the purpose of having languages around the globe. Also, please see the following discussions:

• Russian Wikipedia will have 100K articles soon
• Chinese Wikipedia will have 100k acticles

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 07:35, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

We are really not eurocentric here. We are just reflecting some realities. English is the global lingua franca. So its on the top. It is also used by many countries namely India as language of higher education. Spanish and Portugese are spoken in South America. Chinese and Arabic are the only languages, which are seriously underrated, but, and here come the sad facts: Freedom is speech is suppressed in China. As long as this continues Chinese Wiki will never flourish. The Arabic world has a very poor "culture of knowledge" and well educated Arabic speakers seem to contribute more to the English Wikipedia then to the Arabic Wiki. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 90.152.76.90 (talk) 16:41, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Sigh, this kind of reordering after poll is just another thing that continually recreates an endless cycle of "not sufficiently developed = no display" and "no display = no chance to gather interest for development" OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 20:48, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Search box

Please add below text in a search box.("검색" mean "search" in English.)

<span lang="ko" xml:lang="ko" title="GeomSaek">검색</span> <b>·</b>

<option value="ko" lang="ko" xml:lang="ko">한국어</option>

--Albamhandae 09:27, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Done--Nick1915 - ^{all you want} 10:02, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Italian Wikipedia

The Italian Wikipedia (language code: "it") should be the 6th , why it appears to be the 10th? --137.204.148.73 10:44, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

That's because we sort it by how popular it is (how many people/times it is accessed), not by number of articles. See Top Ten Wikipedias & the poll. Cbrown1023 talk 20:54, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Translation of Search input

Hello. User:Albamhandae translated "search" into Korean. but he removed today. I'd like to know whether "search" can be translated every language or specific language which have 0.1 million article at least in their project.--Kwj2772 08:48, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Korean should not be included in the search box yet. According to ko:특수기능:통계, the project only has 76,299 articles. (It has over 100,000 pages, but not all pages are articles.) – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 01:49, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Remembering a user's choice of language

I've changed the Www.wikipedia.org template/temp to remember a user language choice so that people don't constantly have to keep changing the select box to their preferred search language if they choose to search from www.wikipedia.org. This is achieved using javascript and a cookie. At present the language is decided based on browser language configuration. This change allows the configuration to be overridden.

The cookies is set to expire after month and is called "searchLang" and, if implemented would be local to the www.wikipedia.org domain. Blue-Haired Lawyer 20:42, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks a ton. A lot of users wanted this change (including me), but I'm always reluctant to write any JavaScript involving cookies. It's not for the faint of heart, you see. :^) In the future, please update Www.wikipedia.org template/js whenever you change the portal JavaScript. That way, we can maintain a human-readable version of the code while still minifying it. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 01:51, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Will do. Blue-Haired Lawyer 10:20, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Correct link to German Wikipedia

Please correct the link to the German Wikipedia, they have moved their main page from http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptseite to http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hauptseite

I tested the change at www.wikipedia.org template/temp and it looks like it works fine. Remember the dot 00:38, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

It looks like mxn did it, thanks! Remember the dot 03:24, 18 November 2008 (UTC)