Well, it's secret on mobile. I had the same problem - I wanted to switch languages on mobile wikipedia, but the page appears to provide no way to do that. Functionality that has been carefully designed so you won't find it isn't really an improvement over functionality that isn't there.
> How would you solve this given the limited space? A label saying languages is the mosy obvious but real estate is a little limited.
Try looking at a wikipedia page on your phone. You could replace the 文A button with one that said "antidisestablishmentarianism" and there would still be plenty of space. It's floating at the left of an empty row.
I agree it totally could be improved. Perhaps they're being careful? Elsewhere in the comments, someone showed that logged in users have more items in that bar (https://imgur.com/llv2rtc). That might not work so well in portrait.
I have 5 items in that bar on my Samsung Galaxy and I have no space for a label. As the screenshot shows the labels are there, just not visible until a certain breakpoint
I agree that the UX could be improved and there is plenty of evidence to support that. On the other hand the edit icon is super discoverable and used without the label so I think the challenge with the language icon is 1) there are not many multilingual sites and 2) the other icons there potentially cause the user to ignore them entirely.
Throw in the 200+ languages and longer labels in some of them and it becomes even more complicated...
> I think the challenge with the language icon is 1) there are not many multilingual sites and 2) the other icons there potentially cause the user to ignore them entirely.
Multilingual sites aren't rare at all. There is a conventional way to display a language selector: it's a button (usually a dropdown menu, if you click on it) with a national flag and the name of the language.
The big problem on mobile wikipedia is that wikipedia already has a well-established way to select the language you want to see the article in, and the mobile site completely removes it.
Using a national flag is a really bad UX pattern given the political ramifications and potentially offensive. Languages are not owned by countries. I am not aware of a multilingual site that provides over 200 languages in such a way that its country neutral (switching to a Spain based shopping site is not the same as switching to Spanish)?
As I've said before the mobile site doesn't remove it. It just changes the mechanism for understandable reasons based on the medium.
> Functionality that has been carefully designed so you won't find it
The button is labeled 文A, which is quite common for translation service, and is just under an article title so it’s literally the most visible UI element. It’s difficult to make it more accessible than that...
Pretty sure 99 out of a 100 don't know what "文A" means.
I've had the same complaint, - never once did it occurs to me that "文A" meant translation.
This to me is a testament to the fact that most buttons should actually be text unless extremely common like the hamburger menu, but even that's debatable.
> This to me is a testament to the fact that most buttons should actually be text unless extremely common like the hamburger menu, but even that's debatable.
I agree, especially on mobile (even in 2020, many users — who often just got used to the hamburger menu — don't realize that the vertical ellipsis is a symbol for "menu" or "more options", it often just looks like a random decoration to them), although on a desktop website or app you (hopefully) have the option of hovering the mouse pointer (even accidentally) over any unfamiliar bit of UI gubbins to get a clue.
I'll note though that the specific example of "文A" is, in fact, a text label. The first Chinese glyph even translates as "text".
> I'll note though that the specific example of "文A" is, in fact, a text label.
Only in the sense that those glyphs are used in certain writing systems. It's not text in the more important sense of expressing a linguistic message. It's just random characters. "文A" is a text label to exactly the same degree that ":-)" is a text label.
Note in particular that the Chinese glyph does not translate as "language". That would be 语/語. As you accurately note, it translates as "writing".
That's not quite true - 语 as in 汉语 is a spoken language or dialect. 文 is used for written language, and can mean a language in general, a writing system, or an entire culture, depending on what you combine it with.
That isn't true either. The button has no borders nor any other indication that it's a button; it appears to be a simple decoration on the mobile page.
I only learned about it when somebody pointed it out to me in an HN thread a couple of years ago, like the parent. The button is small and I think since I don't speak Chinese or Japanese my brain tends to skip Chinese characters as I assume that whatever they convey is not aimed at me. It's also alone on the left-hand side, with no decoration or styling showing that it's interactive.
A flag icon or simply some more explicit text would be vastly easier to understand for me, especially if it actually looked like an interactive element.
