Talk:Universal Language Selector

Previous page history was archived for backup purposes at Talk:Universal Language Selector/LQT Archive 1 on 2015-07-10.

The issue has been resolved with new MW 1.40.0

Hello,

I use MW 1.39.3 at my wiki family. I have interwiki links and don't need ULS so far. But interwiki links do not work without the extension at Vector-2022. How can I disable ULS but have my interwiki links?

This question would be more appropriate to developers of the Vector skin.

Thanks! I'll try to make a request them.

The issue has been resolved with new MW 1.40.0

I want to add a basic font, using common.css for English readers - unfortunately, @import has been disabled. There is clearly a perfectly rational reason for it to be disabled by default, turning it back on is probably obvious, in some clearly defined settings file. However, I just want to use a web-font, this seems to be the simplest way to do it.

Please educate me on the reason why it is turned off by default, and how to turn it back on.

If you want to change a font for everyone, the Universal Language Selector extension is not the best way to do it. You can use normal CSS in MediaWiki:Common.css, or maybe there are other extensions to do the same.

@import has been disabled in MediaWiki:Common.css. I don't know why. It doesn't matter, I will manually install a font, however annoying, or use an extension of some kind. But again, hoops where the simplest command, could have prevented hours of toil.

Seems especially weird considering there's input methods for just about every language and script on the planet, but none for two of the most commonly spoken languages in Asia… am I missing something, here? When selecting an input method, "Asia" there's about a hundred languages, including Chinese, but no Japanese and no Korean.

Seems like a huge problem to me. Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

A volunteer has actually started working on support for Korean recently, and it may be deployed soon. However, the Korean script is actually quite simple and a keyboard for it is relatively easy to implement.

Japanese, in contrast, is very complicated. In theory, it can be done, but it will require very complex mapping between syllables and more than a thousand characters. Because of the complexity, the loading time can be prohibitive, too.

Chinese indeed has an input method in Universal Language Selector, but it only outputs Pinyin, which is a relatively simple Latin-based transcription system. A full-fledged input method for Chinese characters would be a bit similar to Japanese, but even harder, so it's unlikely to be implemented here.

Luckily, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese don't actually need special support, because they have been well-supported in all major desktop and mobile operating systems for more than twenty years, and the people who write in them know how to enable and use these keyboards.

The keyboards in Universal Language Selector are mostly targeted at people whose languages are either not supported in operating systems at all (this is true for many languages of Africa), or languages that are supported, but aren't actually used very much by the public for various reasons (languages of India).

closed; thanks for /qqq update.

CC is for Creative Common licence ? Coding Convertions ? or ... ? Thanks. -- Christian 🇫🇷 FR (talk) 07:39, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Closed captioning.

I have a german wiki and am currently working on an english translation. You can track wich language someone is using by implementing some code like this:

{{#ifeq: {{int:edit}} | Edit | English | Not English }}

it returns "English" if someone is using english and "Not English" if someone is using a different language. With this I reworked the whole sidebar to link on their english equivalents if using the english wiki. Now I'm trying to change the link of the logo in the top left corner. I know you can change it by editing the "Mediawiki:Mainpage" page. I tried using this

{{#ifeq: {{int:edit}} | Edit | EnglishMainpage | GermanMainpage}}

but it will always link to the "GermanMainpage". Is their a way to redirect someone on the english/german Maipage by clicking on the logo dependent on wich langauge they have selected?

Ungetestet, aber als Idee:

• Wenn du deine Mainpage als Special:MyLanguage/Mainpage verlinkst und die Versionen davon als Mainpage/de und Mainpage/en anbietest; genauer gesagt: du dich für eine dieser beiden Sprachvarianten als Stammseite entscheidest und die andere als eine von mehreren Übersetzungen dieser Basisversion, dann könnte das vielleicht klappen.

Ansonsten werden dafür gern JavaScript-Gadgets verwendet.

• Siehe w:de:WP:JS sowie w:de:WP:HW.

Danke, das mit dem Special:MyLanguage/Mainpage hat geklappt. Die Hauptseite war sowieso schon übersetzt unter Hauptseite/en.

@PerfektesChaos Ich möchte mich auch für den Tipp bedanken. Konnte damit auch den Logo-Link sprachbezogen machen.

Wäre toll wenn das in die Hilfe der Translate Extension aufgenommen würde.

indonesia

Edit MediaWiki:mainpage-url. If the target is a translatable page, you can use Special:MyLanguage link to redirect to the interface language if available.

Is there a simple list of the available fonts, with links to examples, that can be utilised across the WMF wikis? About the only place that I can find anything that resembles a list is at the git repository, and such a list is hidden away, and not particular user friendly. Is such a list possible, and if it more relates to WMF only, should that then be placed at meta, or is it a subpage from the main namespace page, if more generic? Thanks.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/WebFonts#Selection_of_fonts has a list of languages and default fonts. But there are more fonts than this that are not mapped to any language because they are special fonts to be applied outside the user preferences. Example: Unifraktur is supposed to be applied to a cetain section of wikisource content irrespective of users preference by specifying the font-family style explicitly. And these fonts are not meant for Mediawiki interface fonts. You are right, a list would be nice so that people can choose them and apply wherever relevant. A bit manual effort based on the git repo is needed. Is this something you can help us? Otherwise I will ask my team to consider doing it. thanks!

It was I who raised the WS-related question, and the non-working of the explicit application of the webfonts. Once that issue is resolved, then I can look to assist resolving that component. So the questions that come with that are

1. Can all the fonts be explicitly user-derived with the expressed methodology?
2. Do all the fonts fall under this extension?
3. So would a help page be best here (as a subpage presumably), or at one of the other WMF wikis if there a separate means to add fonts individually per wiki, or for WMF.
4. Is that directory of the repo the only place that contains the fonts, or non-language specific fonts? If not, where are the others located?

Requesting kind Attn: ULS team Amir Aharoni, Niklas Laxstrom, Pau Giner, Santhosh Thottingal & Runa Bhattacharjee

Hi, Seasons Greetings

Ref: Bug 51349 and Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector/EventLogging queries

End of this july at mr-wikipedia we made certain changes to support ULS users with some additional help. On certain counts we found some positive impact. To have better (indepth) understandanding we request you to provide figures again for अक्षरांतरण and मराठी लिपी options of Marathi language ULS for month of August 2014. Or figures prefrably from this week day (or next week day) and again after 30 days.

(But we do not want figures of week ends that is not of saturday or sunday. Preferable any week day from Tuesday to Friday and Indian 'day' time is covered in the same.)

Hello, Thanks for bringing this up. Could you let us know the specific type of data you are looking for? The queries may need to be modified based on the requirements.

Hi,

Data I am looking for mr.wikipedia.org i.e. Marathi language wikipedia.

No.	ULS option for Marathi	What it is called in Marathi at ULS	Data needed 1	Data needed २	Data needed 3	Data needed 4	Data needed 5
1	mr-transliteration	अक्षरांतरण	How many total users enabled mr-transliteration on 28th July 2014 or July 2014	How many total users enabled mr-transliteration on 1st August 2014	How many total users enabled mr-transliteration on 31st August 2014 or for the month of August 2014	How many total users enabled mr-transliteration on 1st Jan 2015 or for the month of Jan 2015	How many total users enabled mr-transliteration on 28th Feb 2015 or for the month of Feb 2015
2	mr-inscript	मराठी लिपी	How many total users enabled mr-inscript 28th July 2014 or July 2014	How many total users enabled mr-inscript on 1st August 2014	How many total users enabled mr-inscript on 31st August 2014 or for the month of August 2014	How many total users enabled mr-inscript on 1st Jan 2015 or for the month of Jan 2015	How many total users enabled mr-inscript on 28th Feb 2015 or for the month of Feb 2015

Why do we need above data (Purpose) ?

• 1) Why we are expecting Data for the month of August and Jan Feb ?

Visitor hits usually are highest for month of August and Jan Feb for Marathi language Wikipedia both as per wiki stats and also as per google trends stats

• 2) At the end of July 2014 we received an audio-visual clip support for ULS Marathi, using the clip we updated help pages and are running a special campaign for month of August 2014.

So far this campaign has shown excellent results on two fronts percentage of Roman script trial and errors has reduced substantially. Secondly hit ratio shows visit to related help pages per day increased from 1 or 2 to strait away 1000 per day. (We do not know exact figure of total hits for Marathi wikipedia per day but it is roughly estimated in between 3000 to 8000 per day. and 96 to 98 % of them are not likely to know how to do Marathi Typing online/Marathi Wikipedia)

• 3) With this August campaign we have seen stunning increase by 1000 hits a day to Marathi Typing help pages unfortunately we have not seen proportionate increase in newcomer and anon edits so far. There is a need to find out what is the actual percentage of the people enabling ULS feature for Marathi language options. With the ULS eventLogin data provided by you we will get to know whether just people are visiting help pages but practically are not enabling ULS or they are enabling ULS but may be some thing else keeping them away from using the feature, So accordingly we can design question/survey to understand user behaviour better and improve upon our support and help pages.

• 4) In any case we have done preparation for sept 2014 for one more campaign for editing mr-wikipedia. We hope sept 2014 campaign will either give more edits or some insight in to the issue why there had not been proportionate increase in edits but for proper comparison certainly we need eventLogin stats as requested above.

Presently we can see the number of hits to a wiki page on our own same way feature for ULS eventLogin stats visibility on our own will be useful to us. For an example data after september 2014 campaign also will be useful to us same way many time november also gets good traffic to mr wiki. Currently we are dependant on ULS team for stats so we are limiting ourselves to August 2014 and Jan -Feb 2015.

Looking forward to support on August 2014 stats at earliest . Thank you, warm regards and best wishes to ULS team

Thanks for the details. Very helpful. I am passing the request onto Amir Aharoni for help with the event-logging data.

Hi, This is a kind reminder. Undersigned is waiting for the requested support with crossed fingures.

Thanks and best wishes

Hi Mahitagar, http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/mr_inputmethods_stats should give the data you requested. Thanks.

Hi Santhosh, Thanks for your kind support, its very nice of you. These figures are very helpfull. While August 2014 (campaign period) figures signal kind of positive impact can be achieved for detail analysis I will be waiting for some stats figures from other place i.e. http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaMR.htm for how many exact new users got added and there contribution etc.

In Agust 2014 campaign we tried to reach out with ULS inro video clip to aprox 1 lack Marathi people but minimum 30 thousand certainly visited one or the other help page. There are roughly 30 lack active Marathi internet users (6 lack regular or more than average active); roughly 2 to 4 % already know some system of unicode Marathi Typing with this campaign we could reach out to additional 1 percent (of 30 lack) .. So conservative estimate 1 in 30 persons would know Marathi Typing that means for a novice to seek a known person's help currently a freinds freind atleast would know a Marathi Typing method. Our (mr-wiki) target needs to be 1 in 5 i.e. 6 lack people should know ULS it self so contribution to mr-wiki improves. (Hopefully mr-wiki would be able to conduct a improved campaign for feb 2015 season)

Figures provided by you indicate in August 2014 ULS -mr options were activated 4680 times where as activation figure total for July 2014 was 2968 so net increase in activating ULS-mr options was 1712 (around 57% increase over a normal month figure) . 1712 additional activations devided by 30 days will be around 57 per day. If we consider average every user activates ULS 3 times in a day then we can safely assume around 19 new users every day activated ULS-mr since net trial edits are not substantially increased that means immidiate repeating of ULS on further days by same person may not be substantial with conservative estimates around 600 new users might have got aquinted with ULS-mr. ( 600 new users trying on 30,000 visitors to help pages comes to 2% and matches with over all Marathi peoples response rate of 1 in 50 persons usually responds to Marathi Wikipedia campaigns online or of line)

There can be several reasons for absence of net increase in edits out of that one could be what to write syndrome so this september we have already started a campaign. Second is new users may not be aquinted in advance with inscript and learning time requirement curve for inscript is longer. Phonetic and inscript 2 options are not much supported yet still hits are there on them. People may be choosing inscript since its nomenclature in ULS -mr translates to marathi script obiviously people may be activating it and not able to get conversant faster enough. Certainly this aspect needs to be investigated further with more surveys locally. And soon we will be doing that. And try improve support so we get better conversion to edits.

BTW new account creation using Devanagari scripts is increased 4 folds since this August and also with lot of grammer mistakes is a separate issue before us to handel and one more related issue already discussed at hi-wiki community and for that likely to come up with a feature request rfc in couple of weeks.

Thanks any way and warm regards

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T58939

We'd like to add a Nastaʿlīq (also written Nastalique, Nastaleeq, Nastaliq) font, but so far no free one was found. There is one which is worth asking about to the author.

I would like to request the default font for Urdu to be a Nastaliq font like Jameel Noori Nastaleeq, Urdu Typesetting, etc. This proposal has been twice rejected here so I am raising the issue on the ULS. Further details can be had there. Hope no one objects...

What font do you suggest? We did some research and Nafees Web Naskh was the only recent free font available, see bugzilla:46693. The others were either obsoleted or unfree.

I was asking for a Nastaliq font, of which the best I've found is "Jameel Noori Nastaliq". Naskh (Nafees) is not the standard way of transcribing Urdu.

That is, http://www.urdujahan.com/font.html ? Thanks for letting us know. The website and zip don't contain any information about licensing; another website says "License: freeware". If you wish this font to be included, please contact the author and ask a free license to be included. Also see Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector for more instructions.

This all requires some further clarification:

• At a unicode level, this all uses arabic text (as far as I'm able to tell, and I'm not sure if there are differences in shaping)
• Nastaliq is the traditional writing style of Urdu language.
• Due to the availability of Naskh scripts (which are also easier to render due to more consistent line height), it has become more common for urdu to be represented in naskh in digital media.
• This is considered to be undesirable however.
• There is no known free nastaliq font.
• There are however nastaliq fonts available on Windows 8, but since they share the same script, they apparently don't really get easily selected by the font systems.
• There is a desire to make https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Script/Nastaliq unneeded, but this is a requirement that ULS cannot fulfill because of the above reasons

So some points to address:

1. A free Nastaliq font is desirable and
2. En.wp doesn't really know what the Urdu wikipedia community thinks of this, it might be useful to figure that out.
3. A temporary solution might be to make it possible to redefine system font styles in a certain language. So you could have in the font drop down for urdu:
   1. nastaliq system

      font-family: "Jameel Noori Nastaleeq", "Urdu Typesetting", sans-serif;
      

   2. NafeesWeb
   3. system default

There is a nice article on Nastaliq typesetting here

BTW, if Fraktur is an ISO15924 defined script variant, it makes you wonder why the different arabic script styles are not/should not defined. There was a very long discussion about this on the unicode mailing list that I have not yet entirely read: http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2005-m11/0094.html

There is this old non-unicode Nastaliq SIL font: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=Nastaliq Not usable of course, but perhaps SIL. Open font library has Hussaini Nastaleeq though, which is MIT (X11) licensed apparently and a descendant of Nafees Nastaleeq. Might be interesting ?

As you can see in bugzilla:46693, we were aware of the former, but not of the latter. It says however that it's a fork from CRULP's Nafees which, in the version linked from the bug, was not free; the page it links is down but Internet Archive has a copy, the license is not standard. It should be clarified whether the author got from CRULP permission to license his derivative under MIT license, or what.

@Nemo_bis Doesn't NafeesWeb have the exact same license though ? http://www.cle.org.pk/software/localization/Fonts/nafeesWebNaskh.html

For that one Kartik found a waiver. Have you read the bug that I've linked about half a dozen times by now in this thread? :)

Well that information isn't in the ticket that I read. It is however hidden in the commit message.

Not sure if this is still an open issue. Could Noto be a possible free font?

https://www.google.com/get/noto/#nastaliq-aran

Its free. 103.94.130.3

Hello guys!

I hereby request that you remove this whola languiage thing u have been putting on wikipedia and make it like it was before:

All languages on left in a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG list.

I usually do use computers on other languages than english and I dont want to have to select whateber. So it's not enough google is making my life more difficult making me use that strange language search even in incognito a lot of times, but also wiki is making it harder because languages are hidden under clicks and search and whatever. MAKE IT EASY:

CTRL+F --> ""ENGLISH"" --> DONE

I recommend getting an account. It does mean having to log in and out on other computers, but then you can mark certain languages as ones you commonly use.