Proposal talk:Change languages quickly

I am not here to discourage this idea, but I felt the need to point out this is basically already done at http://www.wikipedia.org/ with a drop-down box listing the most popular wikis. A proposal of this nature might be something that a user should have the option of turning on and off or selecting which Wikipedias to include and exclude given there are 271 Wikipedias currently available. A drop-down list of 271 options may not be so easy to navigate regularly. I visit many different wikis (although I do not contribute much to most of them), however, I do not consider it very difficult to navigate between them. The alternative method that I use to navigate between wikis involves taking advantage of the unified login. With a unified account, after logging into a wiki once, it is placed in a list within your Preferences page (under "Manage your global account"), available to you regardless of which Wikipedia language you are currently viewing and the list available remains only as large as the pages that I visit without having to skip past the 250 wikis that I will never visit because I don't know the languages. — CobraWiki ^{( jabber | stuff )} 21:55, 15 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A fastkey for switching to languages of ones own choice would then also be easy to implement, presumably, while I believe the extra processing and storage costs will be virtually zero. Rursus 07:52, 19 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I think that you can simply search the whole wikipedia.org with any search engine, just type site:wikipedia.org. Moreover, I don't think that such a feature would be useful to many readers. Nemo 21:47, 19 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Searching the whole of Wikimedia isn't what we're trying to do. We want to quickly jump, for instance, between en.Wikipedia.org and en.Wiktionary.org, two sites I'm sure most of us visit frequently. A drop-down scrolling list or similar feature would allow a user to save themselves the trouble of remembering the URL or using a search engine. The list at the page Cobra mentioned is precisely the list that would be most useful in such a drop-down box. Most forums have "jump-to" drop-down box, why can't Wikimedia? Bob the Wikipedian 01:39, 24 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

When you read an article in e.g. English, you see in the left column a list of other languages having articles on the same topic. Click there to change language. I find this convenient enough. Isn't this ok? OlavN 07:49, 25 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Not if you're wanting to jump to a language that doesn't have that article or to Wiktionary, Commons, etc. Bob the Wikipedian 20:07, 27 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Several projects do have this feature. In my experience this usually does not prove to be helpful, as links are made willy-nilly, disregarding the question if there actually is useful content at the linked site. It just causes the user to feel he is in a huge badly-kept database instead of in an encyclopedia. - Brya 08:30, 30 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Impact?

Some proposals will have massive impact on end-users, including non-editors. Some will have minimal impact. What will be the impact of this proposal on our end-users? -- Philippe 00:06, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The impact on our end-users is that they can quickly change from one wiki to another without typing in the wiki's URL or locating an article with a translation or link to another wiki templated into it. The most useful example of such a switch that I can think of is the English Wikipedia and the English Wiktionary. Bob the Wikipedian 01:38, 22 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

polish, english, russian

I use polish and english wiki almost everyday. I don't use shuahili or so. I think it is great idea.

1. english 2. polish 3. russian 4. drop box (other languages)