Author: dbwiki
Description:
Hi all,
This comes via an OTRS ticket which discussed the issue; those with access can view the ticket at https://secure.wikimedia.org/otrs/index.pl?Action=AgentTicketZoom&TicketID=1883704
Permission was granted to copy the relevant portion of the 10+ email exchange, without any pinfo etc.
Email #1
Wikipedia ignores my first and second prefered languages (en-us, and
en) and selects sweidsh. Even though I can read swedish this is really
annoying, since the swedish database is so much smaller than the
english one. I must set the search language for every search, please
do something about this since Wikipedia is an otherwise really good
site :(
(This problem has arrives in the last week, so maybe you made some
kind of change recently that affected this?)
Email #3
No [I don't use Google Search], I use the site http://www.wikipedia.org, my browser is set to
prefer us-english, english, and as the third choice it is set to
swedish. It will set the default to swedish even though I have set the
preference to english.
Email #5
No, I don't have any account at Wikipedia [replying to whether global account language settings may be the reason why].
I have tried with both Firefox and Internet Explorer. (I never use
Internet Explorer, so it would not have had any stored settings from
Wikipedia that would interfere. I did this after setting the prefered
language of the browser to US-English.) I have also tried to empty all
the caches and cookies from Firefox, but the problem remains.
Email #7
No, I do not like toolbars in the webbrowsers. They tend to pile up
and take too much space, so I do not have the wikipedia search-bar
visible.
I open a new tab in the webbrowser, type in the address
'www.wikipedia.org', and while the page is loading, the search is set
to English, just like I want it to be, but at the instance it finishes
loading, it changes to Swedish (by script I guess), like I do not
want.
As I stated earlier, my default languages in the webbrowser are set to
(in this order): en-us, en, sv, and this is a problem that has arrived
within the last week, without any changes or firefox updates on my
part. (I work with webb-programming myself, so I am quite confident in
my settings, and that I have not updated my browser.)
I must also say that I am quite impressed by your attempts to aid me,
as such help are rare among much too many other
organizations/companies...
Email #10
I have done some research of my own, reading through the scripts on
the page I have problems with. It proved that the problem does lie in
the script of the page http://www.wikipedia.org.
The script gets the language from the DOM-property
window.navigator.language, which is not only non-standard, but does
not actually fetch the preferred language of the user, but the
language that the browser's user-interface uses. Something that causes
trouble for people who want to take advantage of the size of the
English database (like me), or people just using a foreign system.
The solution I would suggest is that the Wikipedia server should use
language negotiation and set the preferred language on the server-side
before sending back the requested start-page. (After which the user
re-selects the language if it is wrong, and the returned
search-results should of course be in the language selected on the
start-page.)
I have solved the problems by reinstalling an English version of
Firefox on my computer (I use Wikipedia daily, so it is worth the
trouble for me), but I think you should pass on this information to
those that implements Wikipedia as it is clearly a bug... Even if they
don't deal with it at once, I think it is good if they know.
...
Thank you for all the time you spent looking into my problem. I am
impressed with the good service.
Regards,
Daniel (posting here on behalf of the above; quoted emails above not mine)
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement