Last modified: 2014-07-28 17:46:13 UTC
On desktop, there is a subtle difference in link color between internal links (to other pages on the same wiki) and interwiki links (such as to pages on another language Wikipedia. These types of links look exactly the same on mobile. I was very confused as to why a certain link kept taking me to the article on Spanish Wikipedia instead of an article on English Wikipedia like I expected, until I looked at the markup and realized it was actually an interwiki link.
Prioritization and scheduling of this bug is tracked on Mingle card https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/mobile/cards/1778
Can you give an example page. If a link on English Wikipedia to Spanish Wikipedia on mobile takes you to an external site e.g. en.m.wikipedia.org to es.m.wikipedia.org in my opinion that should also have an external link icon and thus the class external. If that class is missing we should work on adding that class in the parser that makes it and maybe an interwiki class.
See [[Flamenco]] on en.wiki, where I noticed it. I changed one es: link to a redlink, but I left (because I did not notice it at the time) the link in the infobox to "nuevo flamenco" which points to es.wiki.
Devil's advocate… A. is this differentiation understandable by users, and more importantly, is this important to users?
I've been using Wikipedia for 10 years and I never noticed the difference until today. Apparently interwiki links are a slightly lighter blue than regular links. I honestly can't tell the difference unless I'm comparing them side by side.
I want to hear others points of view, but as it stands my recommendation is this is WONTFIX and isn't actually desirable. I would go further to say that we might even want to considering removing the subtle differentiation that we have now.
I think if nothing else it should show the external link icon - it is confusing to click a link and be taken away from English Wikipedia. Go to mediawiki.org home page for example.
I would say it's definitely important to users to know when a link will take them out of (that language version of) Wikipedia. I'm pretty savvy about how these here wikis work, and I was still very confused when a seemingly internal link took me to a page in another language. Styling interwiki links as internal links is definitely the wrong way to go. As for giving them their own style (as in the desktop view) instead of just styling them like other external links, this is probably only understandable by users who regularly use non-article pages and navigate between wikis... but for them (people like me), the slightly lighter blue of an interwiki link is instantly recognizable. Interwiki links within articles are only a small minority of links, but it's a non-trivial amount nonetheless. Inline links to wiktionary are among the more common use cases. When we're talking about pages outside of mainspace as well, it becomes even more important to be able to differentiate... especially because (to a much greater degree than on desktop) you could navigate to another wiki without even realizing it. There's no new-and-different icon (or visible url, depending on the browser) at the top to let you know that you're all of a suddent on a different wiki.
Jon, I would argue that we could make the case that interwiki links are not and should not look the same as "external" link. I like Sage's idea of another kind of link icon or style that lets you know that the target is internal but in a different language. However on the desktop most modern browsers handle machine translation automatically, so this may be less of an issue.
"on the desktop most modern browsers handle machine translation automatically" Citation needed. AFAIK, only Chrome does this. IMO, we are severely overloading the purpose of link color. Right now we are using it for: 1. Indicate a link rather than normal text 2. Indicate whether the link has been visited or not 3. Indicate whether an article is a stub or not (per prefs) 4. Indicate whether a link is internal or interwiki Personally, I think the best solution (which I know Jon won't like) would be to allow personal CSS on mobile. This would allow power users to style these links however they want to without having to introduce a new preference. I don't like the idea of using yet another link icon, as the meaning of these icons becomes more confusing the more of them we have.
Although I don't prefer it personally, making interwiki links the same as true external links would be okay. But I think non-power-users will find it even *more* confusing if an apparently normal non-external link takes them to a different wiki. At least power users understand the difference between the wikis and how they connect with each other. For others, you're all of a sudden on a website that behaves differently (either a different language, or a different project) and you don't know why... all you wanted was to read the article about "nuevo flamenco" (or the term "flamenco", which is linked in the same article to en.wiktionary).
(Whether we should make interwiki links more easily distinguishable on desktop as well is another matter. Certainly, I've seen plenty of cases where newcomers get confused as to why they suddenly end up on a different wiki in the course of navigating Wikipedia, and Ryan is surely not alone among power users who don't find the current subtle difference useful.)
Closing this as WONTFIX, because it sounds like there's no consensus for how to move forward to make the design consistent and understandable by users on both mobile and desktop. If the design team has some ideas in the future on how this should look, happy to reopen and prioritize work on this on the mobile side :)
